Phillip Cagan | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 30, 1927 Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
| Died | June 15, 2012 (aged 85) [1] Palo Alto, California, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Institution | Columbia University (1966–95) Brown University (1959–66) University of Chicago (1955–58) NBER (1954–55) |
| Field | Economist |
| School or tradition | Chicago School of Economics |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago (MA, PhD) UCLA (BA) |
| Doctoral advisor | Milton Friedman |
| Contributions | Analysis of money Analysis of inflation |
| Awards | Fellow, Econometric Society (1975) |
Phillip David Cagan (April 30, 1927 – June 15, 2012) was an American scholar and author. He was Professor of Economics Emeritus at Columbia University.
Born in Seattle, Washington, Cagan and his family moved to Southern California shortly thereafter. Cagan joined the U.S. Navy at age 17 and fought in World War II. After the war, Cagan decided to go to college, and earned his B.A. from UCLA in 1948. Cagan received his M.A. in 1951, and his Ph.D. in Economics in 1954 from the University of Chicago. [2]
After graduate school, Cagan joined the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in New York City where he worked for two years. Then Cagan re-entered academia, teaching at the University of Chicago for three years, and at Brown University for seven years. In 1966 Cagan was hired by Columbia University, where he taught economics for nearly thirty years — save for fifteen months spent in Washington, D.C., when he was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).
During his time at Columbia, Cagan was also associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C., writing on public policy issues.
Cagan lived in Palo Alto, California during his last years.
Cagan's work focused on monetary policy and the control of inflation. Cagan has published over 100 books, journal articles, reviews, reports, and pamphlets on these and other topics in macroeconomics. He is perhaps best known for Determinants and Effects of Changes in the Stock of Money, 1875–1960, a work that sought to identify the "causal relationships between changes in money, prices and output." [3] The book, part of the NBER series that contained Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz's Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, was praised for its "careful empirical work" and called "the most complete study in the area." [4]
Cagan's most important contribution to economics, however, is the article included in Milton Friedman's edited volume Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money (1956), entitled "The Monetary Dynamics of Hyperinflation," [5] a work that became an "instant classic" in the field. [2]
The article, which contained "extensive manipulation of differential equations and an ingenious use of exponentially weighted averages", [6] analyzed seven hyperinflations and found that "the parameters of money demand functions estimated during hyperinflation generally satisfy the condition of dynamic stability that precludes the inflation from being self-generating, or displaying period-to-period oscillations." [7]
After its publication, Cagan's article generated a significant body of work, as a number of leading macroeconomists either reexamined or extended Cagan's model, most notably "Barro (1970), Sargent and Wallace (1973), Frenkel (1975, 1976a, 1976b, 1977, 1979), Sargent (1977), Abel et al. (1979), Salemi (1979), and Salemi and Sargent (1979)." [8] In addition, monetary economists today often refer to a "Cagan demand function" when modeling the real value of money. [9] [10]
Because of the impact that this groundbreaking work had upon the economics profession, Cagan was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society (the most prestigious society in the field), [11] and was mentioned as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Economics. [12] However, following his death in 2012, he is no longer eligible for a Nobel Prize.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Scientific databases | |
| Other | |
In economics, adaptive expectations is a hypothesized process by which people form their expectations about what will happen in the future based on what has happened in the past. For example, if people want to create an expectation of the inflation rate in the future, they can refer to past inflation rates to infer some consistencies and could derive a more accurate expectation the more years they consider.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
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.
In economics, "rational expectations" are model-consistent expectations, in that agents inside the model are assumed to "know the model" and on average take the model's predictions as valid. Rational expectations ensure internal consistency in models involving uncertainty. To obtain consistency within a model, the predictions of future values of economically relevant variables from the model are assumed to be the same as that of the decision-makers in the model, given their information set, the nature of the random processes involved, and model structure. The rational expectations assumption is used especially in many contemporary macroeconomic models.
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.
The Phillips curve is an economic model, named after William Phillips, that predicts a correlation between reduction in unemployment and increased rates of wage rises within an economy. While Phillips himself did not state a linked relationship between employment and inflation, this was a trivial deduction from his statistical findings. Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow made the connection explicit and subsequently Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps put the theoretical structure in place.
Monetary economics is the branch of economics that studies the different competing theories of money: it provides a framework for analyzing money and considers its functions, and it considers how money can gain acceptance purely because of its convenience as a public good. The discipline has historically prefigured, and remains integrally linked to, macroeconomics. This branch also examines the effects of monetary systems, including regulation of money and associated financial institutions and international aspects.
Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to control either the interest rate payable for very short-term borrowing or the money supply, often as an attempt to reduce inflation or the interest rate, to ensure price stability and general trust of the value and stability of the nation's currency.
In economics, money illusion, or price illusion, is a cognitive bias where money is thought of in nominal, rather than real terms. In other words, the face value of money is mistaken for its purchasing power at a previous point in time. Viewing purchasing power as measured by the nominal value is false, as modern fiat currencies have no intrinsic value and their real value depends purely on the price level. The term was coined by Irving Fisher in Stabilizing the Dollar. It was popularized by John Maynard Keynes in the early twentieth century, and Irving Fisher wrote an important book on the subject, The Money Illusion, in 1928.
Robert Joseph Barro is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas, Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.
John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Thomas John Sargent is an American economist and the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometrics. As of 2020, he ranks as the 29th most cited economist in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims for their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
The policy-ineffectiveness proposition (PIP) is a new classical theory proposed in 1975 by Thomas J. Sargent and Neil Wallace based upon the theory of rational expectations, which posits that monetary policy cannot systematically manage the levels of output and employment in the economy.
David Ernest William Laidler is an English/Canadian economist who has been one of the foremost scholars of monetarism. He published major economics journal articles on the topic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book, The Demand for Money, was published in four editions from 1969 through 1993, initially setting forth the stability of the relationship between income and the demand for money and later taking into consideration the effects of legal, technological, and institutional changes on the demand for money. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.
Georgios Alogoskoufis is a professor of economics at the Athens University of Economics and Business since 1990. He was a member of the Hellenic Parliament from September 1996 till October 2009 and served as Greece's Minister of Economy and Finance from March 2004 till January 2009.
New classical macroeconomics, sometimes simply called new classical economics, is a school of thought in macroeconomics that builds its analysis entirely on a neoclassical framework. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundations based on microeconomics, especially rational expectations.
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 critical of mainstream economics.
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.
Neil Wallace is an American economist and professor of economics at Penn State University. He is considered one of the main proponents of new classical macroeconomics in the field of economics.
Scott B. Sumner is an American economist. He was previously the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His economics blog, The Money Illusion, popularized the idea of nominal GDP targeting, which says that the Federal Reserve and other central banks should target nominal GDP, real GDP growth plus the rate of inflation, to better "induce the correct level of business investment".
