Profile Major Works Resources

Bent Hansen, 1920-2002.

Danish economist at Uppsala, and later UC Berkeley.

Bent Hansen's studies at the University of Copenhagen were interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Denmark in 1940, and he fled across the sound to Sweden.  He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Uppsala,. under Erik Lindahl, with his ground-breaking thesis on inflation. He continued as a professor at Uppsala, and in 1955 was appointed director of the Swedish national business cycle center, the Konjukturinstitutet in Stockholm.  A romantic episode induced him to move to Cairo in 1961, working for a while as an Egyptian government advisor, and then as a consultant for the OECD, Hansen moved to the United States, and became a professor of economics UC Berkeley.  He remained there until his retirement in 1987.

Bent Hansen brought aspects of the Stockholm School into the modern era. His remarkable inflation theory (1951) is reminiscent of that earlier effort and precedes the "disequilibrium" approach of the Walrasian-Keynesian synthesis.

 

  

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Major Works of Bent Hansen

  • A Study in the Theory of Inflation, 1951.
  • Economic Theory of Fiscal Policy, 1955.
  • "Excess Demand, Unemployment, Vancancies and Wages", 1970, QJE.
  • A Survey of General Equilibrium Theory, 1971.
HET

 
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Resources on Bent Hansen

  • "Bent Hansen: In memoriam" obituary at UC Berkeley 

 

 
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