 | This biographical article is written like a résumé .(April 2011) |
Peter Howells is Professor Emeritus of Monetary Economics at the Bristol Business school at the University of the West of England. [1]
| This biographical article is written like a résumé .(April 2011) |
Peter Howells is Professor Emeritus of Monetary Economics at the Bristol Business school at the University of the West of England. [1]
Howells was born in Cardiff (Wales) in 1947, but grew up in Warwick and attended Leamington College from 1959 to 1966. He took his first degree (BA) at the University of Kent at Canterbury, graduating in 1966. Howells then studied (part-time) for his PhD at the London School of Economics from 1970 to 1976 working at the boundaries of economics, history and philosophy. The title of his thesis was 'Economic Theory in Historical Explanation'.
Howells began his teaching career in 1969 at the North East London Polytechnic and stayed until 2003, by which time the institution had evolved into the University of East London. His initial interests were in 20th Century Economic History, but force of circumstance, and an interest in the work of Keynes, persuaded him to take up macro economics and then monetary economics. In his final years at UEL, Howells held the post of Professor of Economics and was teaching U/G Macroeconomics and U/G and P/G courses in Monetary Economics. His approach to monetary economics was colored by the belief that monetary developments (particularly in the policy area) are difficult to understand without an appreciation of how financial markets work. This theme has recurred throughout a number of his textbooks and other publications.
In 2003 Howells moved to the University of the West of England, firstly as Reader in Economics and then as Professor of Monetary Economics. At UWE he taught: U/G level 2: Macroeconomics; Economics of Money and Banking P/G: Principles and Practice of Banking; Monetary Economics; Financial Economics; and was a founding member of the University's Centre for Global Finance. While at UEL and UWE, Howells supervised more than a dozen PhDs to completion. After several earlier attempts, he finally retired from teaching in 2013, but retains contacts at UWE as Professor Emeritus in Monetary Economics.
Howells' earliest publications were inspired by the debate over the role of monetary aggregates, where he supported the Post-Keynesian view that the money supply was endogenously created by the demand for credit. However, he disagreed with the more extreme position espoused by Basil Moore and others who said that because the demand for credit was determined by nominal output (‘the state of trade’) the money supply was an entirely passive variable whose trajectory had little causal relevance to output and/or the price level.
The problem for Howells was that the demand for credit depended on many factors other than the state of trade since borrowing was undertaken to finance all kinds of expenditures, many of them well remote from production. (The demand for mortgages to finance an increasingly speculative housing market in the UK was a good example). Furthermore, since we can show that total transactions are a large and unstable multiple of GDP, we must expect large fluctuations in monetary growth, independent of the path of GDP. The distinction between GDP and total transactions, generally overlooked in modern macroeconomics, has its roots in Irving Fisher [2] and J M Keynes. [3]
More recently publications have focused on aspects of monetary policy design, expressing rather sceptical views about the importance of central bank independence and the transparency of policy-making.
Howellshas held external examiner positions at a number of UK universities and was a Consultant at the Open University 2009–12 advising on the development of courses in personal finance and macroeconomics.
Keynesian economics are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. Instead, it is influenced by a host of factors – sometimes behaving erratically – affecting production, employment, and inflation.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and government spending to regulate an economy’s growth and stability. This includes regional, national, and global economies. According to a 2018 assessment by economists Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson, economic "evidence regarding the consequences of different macroeconomic policies is still highly imperfect and open to serious criticism."
Monetarism is a school of thought in monetary economics that emphasizes the role of governments in controlling the amount of money in circulation. Monetarist theory asserts that variations in the money supply have major influences on national output in the short run and on price levels over longer periods. Monetarists assert that the objectives of monetary policy are best met by targeting the growth rate of the money supply rather than by engaging in discretionary monetary policy. Monetarism is commonly associated with neoliberalism.
Post-Keynesian economics is a school of economic thought with its origins in The General Theory of John Maynard Keynes, with subsequent development influenced to a large degree by Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Sidney Weintraub, Paul Davidson, Piero Sraffa and Jan Kregel. Historian Robert Skidelsky argues that the post-Keynesian school has remained closest to the spirit of Keynes' original work. It is a heterodox approach to economics.
The IS–LM model, or Hicks–Hansen model, is a two-dimensional macroeconomic tool that shows the relationship between interest rates and assets market. The intersection of the "investment–saving" (IS) and "liquidity preference–money supply" (LM) curves models "general equilibrium" where supposed simultaneous equilibria occur in both the goods and the asset markets. Yet two equivalent interpretations are possible: first, the IS–LM model explains changes in national income when the price level is fixed in the short-run; second, the IS–LM model shows why an aggregate demand curve can shift. Hence, this tool is sometimes used not only to analyse economic fluctuations but also to suggest potential levels for appropriate stabilisation policies.
New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroeconomics.
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
Business cycles are intervals of expansion followed by recession in economic activity. They have implications for the welfare of the broad population as well as for private institutions. Typically business cycles are measured by applying a band pass filter to a broad economic indicator such as Real Gross Domestic Production. Here important problems may arise with a commonly used filter called the "ideal filter". For instance if a series is a purely random process without any cycle, an "ideal" filter, better called a block filter, a spurious cycle is produced as output. Fortunately methods such as [Harvey and Trimbur, 2003, Review of Economics and Statistics] have been designed so that the band pass filter may be adapted to the time series at hand.
Neutrality of money is the idea that a change in the stock of money affects only nominal variables in the economy such as prices, wages, and exchange rates, with no effect on real variables, like employment, real GDP, and real consumption. Neutrality of money is an important idea in classical economics and is related to the classical dichotomy. It implies that the central bank does not affect the real economy by creating money. Instead, any increase in the supply of money would be offset by a proportional rise in prices and wages. This assumption underlies some mainstream macroeconomic models. Others like monetarism view money as being neutral only in the long run.
In macroeconomic theory, liquidity preference is the demand for money, considered as liquidity. The concept was first developed by John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) to explain determination of the interest rate by the supply and demand for money. The demand for money as an asset was theorized to depend on the interest foregone by not holding bonds. Interest rates, he argues, cannot be a reward for saving as such because, if a person hoards his savings in cash, keeping it under his mattress say, he will receive no interest, although he has nevertheless refrained from consuming all his current income. Instead of a reward for saving, interest, in the Keynesian analysis, is a reward for parting with liquidity. According to Keynes, money is the most liquid asset. Liquidity is an attribute to an asset. The more quickly an asset is converted into money the more liquid it is said to be.
Modern Monetary Theory or Modern Money Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires. MMT is opposed to the mainstream understanding of macroeconomic theory, and has been criticized by many mainstream economists.
The neoclassical synthesis (NCS), neoclassical–Keynesian synthesis, or just neo-Keynesianism was a neoclassical economics academic movement and paradigm in economics that worked towards reconciling the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). It was formulated most notably by John Hicks (1937), Franco Modigliani (1944), and Paul Samuelson (1948) dominated economics in the post-war period and formed the mainstream of macroeconomic thought in the 1950s 1960s, and 1970s.
Paul Davidson is an American macroeconomist who has been one of the leading spokesmen of the American branch of the post-Keynesian school in economics. He is a prolific writer and has actively intervened in important debates on economic policy from a position that is very critical of mainstream economics.
In macroeconomics, particularly in the history of economic thought, the Treasury view is the assertion that fiscal policy has no effect on the total amount of economic activity and unemployment, even during times of economic recession. This view was most famously advanced in the 1930s by the staff of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer. The position can be characterized as:
Any increase in government spending necessarily crowds out an equal amount of private spending or investment, and thus has no net impact on economic activity.
Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
Basil John Moore was a Canadian post-Keynesian economist, best known for developing and promoting endogenous money theory, particularly the proposition that the money supply curve is horizontal, rather than upward sloping, a proposition known as horizontalism. He was the most vocal proponent of this theory, and is considered a central figure in post Keynesian economics
Richard Andreas Werner is a German banking and development economist who is a university professor at De Montfort University.
Victoria Chick is a Post Keynesian economist. She has made contributions to the understanding of Keynes's General Theory.
Stock-flow consistent models (SFC) are a family of macroeconomic models based on a rigorous accounting framework, which guarantees a correct and comprehensive integration of all the flows and the stocks of an economy. These models were first developed in the mid-20th century but have recently become popular, particularly within the post-Keynesian school of thought. Stock-flow consistent models are in contrast to dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, which are used in mainstream economics.
Marxism and Keynesianism is a method of understanding and comparing the works of influential economists John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx. Both men's works has fostered respective schools of economic thought that have had significant influence in various academic circles as well as in influencing government policy of various states. Keynes' work found popularity in developed liberal economies following the Great Depression and World War II, most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States in which strong industrial production was backed by strong unions and government support. Marx's work, with varying degrees of faithfulness, led the way to a number of socialist states, notably the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The immense influence of both Marxian and Keynesian schools has led to numerous comparisons of the work of both economists along with synthesis of both schools.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
