Hayek’s Hidden Critique of The General Theory
Pages 212-224
David Sanz and Juan Morillo

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6000/1929-7092.2015.04.22

Published: 14 December 2015

Abstract: Hayek is seen as one of the main opponents of Keynes because of the debate about macroeconomics that they had in the early thirties. A few years after this controversy, Keynes published The General Theory ([1936] 1973), and Hayek was expected to criticize Keynes’ new model. But, surprisingly, Hayek decided to remain silent and let his opponent go unchallenged. He regretted it ever after. However, this paper argues that in Hayek’s work after 1936, there is a criticism of The General Theory that to a certain extent has remained unnoticed. Thus, this approach reopens the great debate between Hayek and Keynes just where they had apparently left it, that is, after the publication of The General Theory.

Homoclinic Bifurcation and Endogenous Cycles in the Dynamic IS-LM Model
Pages 242-250
Giovanni Bella

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6000/1929-7092.2015.04.24

Published: 14 December 2015

Abstract: This paper contributes to the new keynesian literature by showing that stable endogenous cycles can emerge as equilibrium solutions of the traditional IS-LM model. The application of the original Bogdanov-Takens theorem allows us to determine the regions of the parametric space where the model exhibits a global indeterminate solution, and a low-growth trapping region, characterized by a continuum of equilibrium trajectories in the proximity of a homoclinic bifurcation.

Target Capital Structure Determinants and Speed of Adjustment Analysis to Address the Keynes-Hayek Debate
Pages 225-241
André Getzmann, Sebastian Lang and Klaus Spremann

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6000/1929-7092.2015.04.23

Published: 14 December 2015

Abstract: According to F. A. Hayek, Keynes’ General Theory neglects an analysis of the production structure. As a contribution to this research gap, we look at companies’ decisions to finance investments and at their agility to adjust their capital structure. We thus study the relationship between capital structure to finance corporate production and shifts in aggregate demand. Target capital structure determinants and speeds of adjustment to these target capital structures will be analyzed for a geographically comprehensive sample of 2,706 companies listed in Asia, Europe and the U.S.A. in the period 1995 – 2009. Aggregate demand turns out to be the coordinating force which determines managers’ choices of target capital structures. The speed of adjustments towards target capital structures indicate that firms are agile in adapting to their targets. Our results provide evidence on Keynes’ General Theory from a firm level perspective: Firms respond quickly to shifts in aggregate demand by adjusting capital and production structure correspondingly..

Ludwig M. Lachmann Against the Cambridge School
Pages 251-267
Carmelo Ferlito

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6000/1929-7092.2015.04.25

Published: 14 December 2015

Abstract: While in the early 1930s Keynes and Hayek were the major figures in a heated academic debate about money and capital, in which Keynes also and especially involved the Italian Piero Sraffa, it might seem at first sight that the Austrian economist set aside an organic demolition of the ideas expressed in 1936 by his rival in the General Theory. Hayek himself, in the future, would regret not having devoted an organic work to criticising the new Keynesian theories. However, as demonstrated in Sanz Bas (2011), although it is not possible to find a debate such as the one on the Treatise on Money, Hayek’s subsequent works do include timely and reasoned criticisms as regards the main conclusions of the new Cambridge macroeconomics.

But the ‘Austrian knight’ of a new Vienna-Cambridge debate, in the subsequent decades, was the German economist Ludwig M. Lachmann (1906-1990), a student of Hayek at LSE during the 1930s and later a professor in Johannesburg and New York. Lachmann was one of the protagonists of the Austrian revival after 1974 and the founding leader of the ‘hermeneutic stream’, opposed by the Rothbardian stream.

Lachmann, defending Keynes’s subjectivism and expectation theory, revived the Vienna-Cambridge controversy, criticising not Keynes but his followers, in particular the ‘new’ Cambridge School, developed by Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa. Lachmann’s life sight was to build a new economics paradigm, centred on the idea of market process, expectations and kaleidic society (Shackle); in order to do so he developed a deep attack toward the new Cambridge macroeconomics mainstream, arising from World War II ashes during the 1950s and 1960s. His polemic toward the ‘modern’ macroeconomics can be read in all his books and papers, but it is particularly evident in Lachmann (1973, [1986a] 1994).

His preferred targets were Sraffa and Joan Robinson, ‘guilty’, according to Lachmann, to overcome Keynes’s subjectivism and to develop a new Neo-Ricardian approach. The resulting macroeconomics is accused to be excessively formalist, ignoring the microfoundations that are at the very root of human action and choice.

But Lachmann’s attack was not only an epistemological one. He intensively tried to demolish all the pillars of the Cambridge macroeconomics: capital as aggregate, long run equilibrium, the absence of innovation and technological change and the conception of rate of profit. His starting point was an economics based on human expectations as the only possible source of human actions. A source, however, never at rest, and continuously influenced by technological change and changing information.

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