Post-Keynesian macroeconomics since the mid 1990s: main developments

Abstract

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Some obstacles to wage-led growth

“…There is little or nothing on them in the 21 papers in four recent special issues (in 2016 and 2017) of this journal on wage-led growth, or in Hein's otherwise excellent 9 survey of developments in the broader Post Keynesian literature since the mid-1990s (Hein 2017a). Thus the remainder of this paper deals with issues concerning the labour market and the industrial relations system.…”

How Capitalism Endogenously Creates Rising Income Inequality and Economic Crisis: The Macro Political Economy Model of Early Industrial Relations

“…However, in IEIR some aspects of monopoly and monsopsony are efficiency and welfare enhancing. Following Schumpeter (), for example, an element of monopoly gives firms the profit and market stability needed for innovation and long‐term investment projects while a degree of monopsony goes with primary/high‐road employment systems and high‐performance human resource management practices, although frequently in the context of two‐sided bilateral monopoly (Molloy and Barney ; Kaufman ).…”

“…The driver of capitalism is profit‐seeking and innovation (not prices and demand/supply which later adjust) and short‐ and long‐run cycles come from entrepreneurs’ forward‐looking profit expectations and their success at discovering new opportunities through devices such as new products, improved production technology, and lower‐cost labor (Commons : Ch. 9; Schumpeter ; Slichter ).…”

“…Given the current‐day importance of the income inequality topic, and plethora of competing and sometimes incommensurate explanations, this paper makes a contribution by going back to the institutional economics/industrial relations (IEIR) literature of the 1920s–1930s, with primary focus on the American team of Commons, Douglas, and Slichter (CDS), and analytically represents their theory of endogenous wage stagnation, rising income inequality, and macroeconomic crisis. Their theory is distinctive because it was the first alternative to Marxist versions, complemented and incorporated business cycle ideas from other early institutionalists like Veblen and Mitchell (Davanzati and Pacella ; Sherman ), and has significant points of overlap but also key differences with modern Post‐Keynesian and Marxist theories (Goda ; Hein ).…”

Trend and business cycles with external markets: Non‐capacity generating semi‐autonomous expenditures and effective demand

“… Skott and Zipperer (, p. 294) choose to critique a straw person: ‘The Kaleckian model says nothing about the movements in π however’. As Hein () notes, Skott's ‘claim that Kaleckians have not thought about feedbacks of demand and growth on income distribution is therefore unwarranted’.…”