DID IRVING FISHER REALLY DISCOVER THE PHILLIPS CURVE?

Don Mathews

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2019, vol. 41, issue 2, 255-271

Abstract: Economic lore has it that, with his 1926 article, “A Statistical Relation between Unemployment and Price Changes,” Irving Fisher “discovered the Phillips curve.” Did he? This paper argues he did not, for two reasons. One: the statistical relationship between inflation and unemployment that Fisher described in his 1926 article was contemporaneously described by Alvin Hansen, Henri Fuss, John Rotherford Bellerby, and Arthur Pigou in their own studies. Two: the statistical relationship that Fisher, Hansen, Fuss, Bellerby, and Pigou described is substantially different from the statistical relationship that Alban William Phillips described in his famous 1958 paper, as well as the many variations of the Phillips curve in the literature, including today’s conventional expectations-augmented Phillips curve. To correct the economic lore, the work of Fisher, Hansen, Fuss, Bellerby, and Pigou on the statistical relationship between inflation and unemployment and Phillips’s 1958 paper should be viewed as separate contributions.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jhisec:v:41:y:2019:i:02:p:255-271_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().