Profile Major Works Resources

Friedrich August Lutz, 1901-1975

German Ordo-liberal economist.

Friedrich A. Lutz trained at Heidelberg, Berin and Tübingen, then citadels of the German Historical School tradition.  Lutz wrote his doctorate at Tübingen in 1925 under Walter Eucken. After a period in the private sector, re-joined Eucken at the faculty of the University of Freiburg in 1932.  His 1932 work on was a contribution to the business cycle theory debate.

His liberal political views unamenable to the Nazis, Friedrich Lutz traveled to England on a Rockefeller fellowship in 1934-35.  Lutz eventually married L.S.E. economist Vera C. Smith in April 1937, and they traveled on a second Rockefeller fellowship to the United States in 1938, where Lutz took a position as instructor at Princeton in 1939, eventually rising to full professor.  The Lutzes remained in Princeton until 1951,  when they returned to Europe.  After a visiting position at Freiburg for a year, Friedrich A. Lutz became professor of economics at the University of Zurich in 1953, where he remained until his retirement.

Friedrich Lutz's main contributions are in the Neoclassical theory of interest and investment.   His influential Theory of Investment (1951), co-written with Vera, tried to merge conventional Neoclassical and time-dependent Austrian theories.  He followed this up with his 1956 review of theories, translating the theories of Fisher, Bohm-Bawerk, Wicksell and Fisher into modern form.

 

  

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Major Works of Friedrich A. Lutz

  • Das Konjukturproblem in der Nationalokonomie, 1932.
  • "The Structure of Interest Rates", 1940, QJE
  • "Professor Hayek's Theory of Interest", 1943, Economica
  • "The Criteria of Maximum Profits in the Theory of the Firm", 1945, QJE
  • Corporate Cash Balances in Manufacturing and Trade, 1945.
  • Theory of Investment of the Firm, with Vera Lutz, 1951.
  • "The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates", 1954, BNLQR
  • The Theory of Interest, 1956.
  • "Die Liquidität des Banksystems und die Zinssätze", 1961, WWA
  • "Probleme der Zinstheorie", 1968, WWA
HET

 
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Resources on Friedrich A. Lutz

 

 
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