34 books like Behavioural Macroeconomics

Similarly, like John Maynard Keynes is considered to be “father of macroeconomics”, Irving Fisher is considered to be “father of money illusion”, which is a failure to perceive that the dollar expands or shrinks in value.

Although this book is older, it is highly topical for me, because of the rapid development of behavioral macroeconomics, which brings back attention to the resurrected concept of money illusion.

Fisher remarkably demonstrates, with the help of illustrative examples, direct harm which might be experienced in real life by people who suffer from money illusion in financial markets or labor markets. Fisher uses persuasive case studies based on his own observations. 

He also utilizes money illusion and its indirect harms in order to explain the nature of the business cycle, in which case money is not neutral in the short run.

One of the disadvantages to writing a book with any economics in it is just that, readers need to know a little economics to get the most out of your book.

But to grasp how oil and the dollar interact and why we wind up in repeating financial crises, you don’t have to go back and reread Keynes and Irving Fischer (on interest rates). In 2009, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller wrote this easy-to-read and easy-to-understand book that critiques traditional economics (e.g. it’s dependence on “rational” actors) and dissects the building blocks one needs to know to grasp the ins and outs of economic cycles.

Importantly, they explain why people continue to believe they can make a fortune by investing at the top of the market (the confidence multiplier and contagion). Their book leads the reader through the basics on how bubbles (irrational exuberance) and panics ensue… show more.

I like this book especially due to its ability to illustrate money illusion in a very unconventional context.

Normally, money illusion means that people take nominal variables as proxy for real variables, which leads to suboptimal choice having real effects on the economy and affecting business cycle.

However, to my great surprise this book claims that even economic experts might suffer from some kind of money illusion, because they tend to misinterpret what is happening in the monetary system. This offers a very interesting explanation of recession and suggests that economists have not targeted adequate variables.

Unconventional suggestion to practice nominal GDP (gross domestic product) targeting instead of targeting the money supply is “outcome” of unique author´s vision called market monetarism. Inattention of policymakers to development of nominal GDP is blamed to be the direct cause of recession. 

This book is more scientific, but very interesting if you like to dig more into the depth of money illusion backed by its experimental investigation.

The old concept of money illusion is updated and transformed into its modern version, which is built on the principle of strategic complementarity. In this case, even a negligible individual money illusion suffered by only few agents might multiply effects of money illusion at the aggregate level due to a well-known mainstream concept called coordination failure. Modern money illusion might be responsible for substantial effects at the aggregate level.

For me, this book is very appealing, since the non-neutrality of money in the short run is explained in an alternative way, but it does not deny standard rational expectations theory.

Take Hayek’s market economy as a Bohemian accordion orchestra.

As its instruments produce music, each elongates, pulls in air (analogous to money), and compresses, expresses air (money). Air-in (savings) is equal to air-out (investment). Fluctuating elongations and compressions are an essential feature of the orchestra (the economy).

For Hayek, interference with harmonious accordion (economic) activity infusing or restricting air (money) would spoil the music.

Economic fluctuations stem from preferences, spending for present enjoyment, or saving for future gains. Relative demands for end products or capital impact relative prices, costs, and returns, affecting savings/investment. Investment money, as IOUs, flies where returns are highest.

Hayek engages readers to prove that bank interventions’ tinkering with money is as capable of producing compassionate social outcomes as free individuals using their earnings as they wish.

When I first met him at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in 1969, I was immediately fascinated by Bernard Schmitt’s passion for scientific research and by his novel approach to monetary macroeconomics.

Three years later I started working with him as a teaching and research assistant and went on working as his closest collaborator until his death in 2014. The other two co-editors of this book also had the privilege to work closely with him.

Conceived as an homage to Schmitt’s legacy, this book is a collection of contributions explaining the historical origin, the analytical content, and the current relevance of Schmitt’s quantum macroeconomic analysis.

The book brings together a series of contributions to monetary macroeconomics as well as Bernard Schmitt’s last critique to relative price determination.

I recommend it to the reader interested in monetary theory because it gives an overview of the most challenging topics in this field, from money to financial crisis, passing through profit formation, inflation, and unemployment.

International issues are also considered, while a groundbreaking analysis of sovereign debt and interest payments is presented in what was to become Schmitt’s last contribution in English to international macroeconomics.

During my graduate school years at Carnegie-Mellon University, I was exposed to Thomas Sargent’s Macroeconomic Theory, which taught me how to work with difference equations.

More importantly, it inculcated the notion in me that economic theory and econometrics are inseparable notions. The approach that I attained from this book together with the courses that I took at Carnegie-Mellon’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration - GSIA as it was called then – have colored by my research outlook and my research itself over the years.

While Thomas Sargent produced many other graduate textbooks on macroeconomics in future years, I might say this was the most influential one (for me) in terms of the fluidity of its writing and its attempt to bridge macroeconomic theory and empirical research. 

This is a collected volume that Kevin Hoover of Duke University put together to provide a philosophical and methodological viewpoint on the empirical and quantitative research that was emerging from the Universities of Chicago, Minnesota, Carnegie-Mellon, Rochester in the 1970s and 1980s.

My own article, “Time-to-Build and Aggregate Fluctuations: Some New Evidence”, originally published in International Economic Review in 1989, was re-printed in this volume. Why was this article re-printed in this volume? It showed that a tightly-specified representative consumer model of aggregate fluctuations, regardless of the theoretical enhancements and econometric approach, could not explain series like aggregate output, consumption and investment jointly with aggregate hours.

While Kevin Hoover continued his methodological research on causality, micro-foundations of macroeconomics and the like, this research led me to delve into micro data models of consumption and labor supply with my co-author Robert Miller from CMU to model individual choices under aggregate shocks.     

I am an academic economist, but even more interested in intellectual debates. I discovered this book when I was a PhD student, and it has remained a favorite of mine.

In the 1970s, macroeconomics (not my field) underwent a revolution. The old guard was “Keynesian,” the new Turks were “new classical”. This book is a series of conversations from the early 1980s with the protagonists of this epic period, many future Nobel laureates.

The interviewer, Arjo Klamer, was interested in the rhetoric and culture of economics, and he constructed the interviews in a way that nicely brought out these elements. The interlocutors are brilliant, acerbic, and funny. If you think economics is dry or boring, you won’t think so after seeing how passionate these people are.