Profile Major Works Resources

Edmund S. Phelps, 1933-

Photo of E.S.Phelps

American macroeconomist at Columbia, associated with the Monetarist school.

Originating from Evanston, Illinois, Edmund S. Phalps obtained his B.A. from Amherst in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1959.  From 1960 to 1966, Phelps was at Yale and associated with the Cowles Foundation.  After a sojourn at Penn, Edmund Phelps was appointed professor of economics at Columbia, where he has remained since.

Phelps's early work on growth theory led to his discovery (via his 1961 "Oiko Nomos" fable) of "Golden Rule" for optimal growth.  But Phelps is perhaps best known for his assault on the Phillips Curve in the late 1960s, its augmentation by adaptive expectations and, most famously, the articulation of the "natural rate of unemployment" (or NAIRU) hypothesis (1967, 1968, 1970).  Phelps's natural rate concept, posited simultaneously by Milton Friedman, became a central plank of the Monetarist school during the debates of the 1970s.  Phelps went on to introduce search models into economics to explain frictional unemployment in the context of imperfect information.

Edmund S. Phelps won the Nobel Memorial Prize in 2006 "for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy".

 

  


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Major works of Edmund S. Phelps

  • "A Test for the Presence of Cost Inflation in the United States, 1955-57", 1961, Yale Economic Esssays.
  • "The Golden Rule of Accumulation: A fable for growthmen", 1961, AER.
  • "The New View of Investment: A Neoclassical analysis", 1962, QJE
  • "The Accumulation of Risky Capital: A Sequential Utility Analysis", 1962, Econometrica
  • "Substitution, Fixed Proportions, Growth and Distribution", 1963, IER
  • Fiscal Neutrality Toward Economic Growth, 1965.
  • "Second Essay on the Golden Rule of Accumulation", 1965, AER  [cwls]
  • "Anticipated Inflation and Economic Welfare", 1965, JPE [cwls]
  • Golden Rules of Economic Growth, 1966.
  • "Investment in Humans, Technological Diffusion, and Economic Growth", with R.R. Nelson, 1966, AER [cwls]
  • "Factor-Price-Frontier Estimation of a 'Vintage' Production Model of the Postwar United States Nonfarm Business Sector" with C. Phelps, 1966, REStat [cwls]
  • "Phillips curves, Expectations of Inflation and Optimal Unemployment Over Time", 1967, Economica.[pdf]
  • "Money-Wage Dynamics and Labor Market Equilibrium”, 1968, JPE (another version pub. in Phelps, 1970).
  • "On Second-Best National Saving and Game-Equilibrium Growth", with R.A. Pollack, 1968, RES
  • "The New Microeconomics in Inflation and Employment Theory", 1969, AEA (another version pub. in Phelps, 1970)
  • "Public Debt, Taxation and Capital Intensiveness" with Karl Shell, 1969, JET [pdf]
  • "Optimal Price Policy under Atomistic Competition" with S.G. Winter, in Phelps et al., 1970
  • Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory, 1970.
  • "Money, Public Debt, Inflation and Real Interest", with E. Burmeister, 1971, JMCB.
  • Inflation Policy and Unemployment Theory: The cost-benefit approach to monetary planning, 1972.
  • "Money, Public Expenditure and the Labor Supply", 1972, JET
  • "The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism", 1972, AER
  • "Taxation of Wage Income for Economic Justice", 1973, QJE
  • "Inflation in a Theory of Public Finance", 1973, Swedish JE.
  • Fiscal Neutrality Toward Economic Growth, 1974
  • "The Indeterminacy of Game-Equilibrium Growth in the Absence of an Ethic," 1975, in Phelps, editor, Altruism, Morality and Economic Theory
  • "Linear Taxation of Wealth and Wages for Intergenerational Lifetime Justice: Some Steady-State Cases," with J.A. Ordover, 1975, AER
  • "Linear 'Maximin' Taxation of Wage and Property Income on a "Maximin' Growth Path", 1976, in Balassa and Nelson, editors, Economic Progress, Private Values and Public Policy
  • "Social Policy and Uncertain Careers: Beyond Rawls's Paradigm Case," 1976, in Grieson, editor, Urban and Public Economics 
  • "Recent Development in Welfare Economics: Justice et Equity," 1977, in M.D. Intrillagator, editor, Frontiers of Quantitative Economics
  • "Stabilizing Powers of Monetary Policy under Rational Expectations", with J. Taylor, 1977, JPE.
  • "Rawlsian Growth: Dynamic Programming of Capital Wealth for Intergeneration 'Maximin' Justice," with J.G. Riley, 1978, RES
  • "Commodity-Supply Shock and Full-Employment Monetary Policy", 1978, JMCB
  • "Inflation Planning Reconsidered," 1978, Economica
  • "Trans-National Effects of Fiscal Shocks in a Two-Country Model of Dynamic Equilibrium", 1978, CROCH
  • "Disinflation without Recession: Adaptive guideposts and monetary policy", 1979, WWA.
  • "On the Concept of Optimal Taxation in the Overlapping-Generations Model of Economic Growth," with J.A. Ordover, JPubE
  • Studies in Macroeconomic Theory, 2 vols, 1979-80.
  • "Cracks on the Demand Side: A Year of Crisis in Theoretical Macroeconomics", 1982, AER
  • "A Model of Non-Walrasian General Equilibrium: Its Pareto Inoptimality and Pareto Improvement," with G.A. Calvo, 1983, in Tobin, editor, Macroeconomics, Prices and Quantities.
  • ."Implicit Contracts and the Social Contract" 1983, in  Dornbusch and Simonson, editors, Inflation, Debt and Indexation 
  • "The Trouble with Rational Expectations and the Problem of Inflation Stabilization", 1983, in Frydman and Phelps, editors, Individual Forecasting and Aggregate Outcomes
  • Political Economy, 1985
  • "Profits Theory and Profits Taxation", 1986, IMF Staff Papers
  • The Slump in Europe, with J.P. Fitoussi, 1988
  • "Optimum Fiscal Policy When Monetary Policy is Bound by a Rule," with K. Velupillai, 1988, in Arrow and Boskin, editors, Economics of Public Debt
  • "A Working Model of Slump and Recovery from Disturbances to Capital-Goods Demand in an Open Non-Monetary Economy", 1988, AER
  • "New Channels in the Transmission of Foreign Shocks," 1989, in Calvo et al., editors, Debt, Stabilization and Development 
  • Seven Schools of Macroeconomic Thought, 1990
  • "The Effectiveness of Macropolicies in a Small Open-Economy Dynamic Aggregative Model," 1991, in Brainard et al., editors,  Money, Macroeconomics, and Economic Policy 
  • "A Working Model of Slump and Recovery from Disturbances to Capital-Goods Demand in a Closed Non-Monetary Economy," 1991, in Nell and Semmler, editors, Nicholas Kaldor and Mainstream Economics
  • "Testing 'Keynesian' Unemployment Theory against 'Structuralist' Theory: Global Evidence from the Past Two Decades," 1991, in Nerlove, editor, Issues in Contemporary Economics
  • "Consumer Demand and Equilibrium Unemployment in a Customer-Market Incentive-Wage Economy", 1992, QJE
  • "Macroeconomic Shocks in a Dynamized Model of the Natural Rate of Unemployment," with H.T. Hoon, 1992, AER
  • "Pro-Keynesian and Counter-Keynesian Implications of the 'Structuralist' Theory of Unemployment and Interest under the Classic Two-Sector View of Capital and Production", 1993, in Knoester, editor, Taxation in the United States and Europe.
  • "Fiscal Policy and Economic Activity in the Neoclassical Theory with and without Bequests," with G. Kanaginis, 1994, Finanz Archiv
  • Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Assets, 1994
  • "Low-Wage Employment Subsidies versus the Welfare State", 1994, AER [phls]
  • "The Origins and Further Development of the Natural Rate of Unemployment," 1994, in Cross, editor, The Natural Rate Twenty-Five Years On [phls]
  • "The Structuralist Theory of Employment", 1995, AER [phls]
  • "Autobiography of E.S. Phelps" 1995, in Heertje, Makers of Modern Economics [phls]
  • "Payroll Taxes and Wage Subsidies", 1995, Testimony [phls]
  • Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise, 1997
  • "Growth, Wealth and the Natural Rate: Is Europe's Jobs Crisis a Growth Crisis?" with H.T. Hoon, 1997, European ER
  • "The Rise and Downward Trend of the Natural Rate", with G. Zoega, 1997, AER [phls]
  • "Natural-rate theory and OECD unemployment," with G. Zoega, 1998, EJ
  • "Moral Hazard and Independent Income in a Modern Intertemporal-Equilibrium Model of Involuntary Unemployment and Mandatory Retirement," 1998, in Chichilnisky, editor, Markets, Information and Uncertainty
  • "Macroeconomics for a Modern Economy", 2006 [nobel]
  • "Refounding Capitalism", 2009, Capitalism and Society.
  • "Past", "Present" and "Future" 2010, in Crittenden, ed., Future of Money [pdf1, pdf2, pdf3]
  • "Wanted: A first national bank of innovation", with Leo Tilman, 2010, Harvard BR [pdf]
  • "What's wrong with the West's economies?", 2015, NY Rev Books [onl]

 


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Resources on Edmund S. Phelps

 

 
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