Wassily Leontief and His German Period

Harald Hagemann

A chapter in Russian and Western Economic Thought, 2022, pp 363-388 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Wassily Leontief Jun. (1905–1999) movedLeontief, Wassily to Berlin in April 1925 after getting his first academic degree from the University of Leningrad. In Berlin, he mainly studied with Werner Sombart and LadislausLadislaus (Vladislav) von Bortkiewicz von Bortkiewicz who were the referees of his Ph.D. thesis “The economy as a circular flow” (1928). From spring 1927 until April 1931, Leontief was a member of the research staff at the Kiel Institute of World Economics, interrupted by the period from April 1929 to March 1930 when he was an advisor to the Chinese Ministry of Railroads. In the journal of the Kiel Institute, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Leontief had already published his first article “Die Bilanz der russischen Volkswirtschaft. Eine methodologische Untersuchung” [The balance of the Russian economy. A methodological investigation] in 1925. In Kiel, Leontief primarily worked on the statistical analysis of supply and demand curves. Leontief’s method triggered a fierce critique by Ragnar Frisch, which launched a heavy debate on “pitfalls” in the construction of supply and demand curves. The debate started in Germany but was continued in the USA where Leontief became a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in summer 1931. The Leontief–Frisch controversy culminated in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (1934), published by Harvard University, where Leontief made his sub­sequent career from 1932–1975. His later analysis of the employment consequences of technological change in the 1980s had some roots in his Kiel period.

Keywords: Circular flow analysis; Wassily Leontief; Supply and demand curves; Technological unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 B23 B31 C67 D57 E24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:spshcp:978-3-030-99052-7_17

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030990527

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-99052-7_17

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Studies in the History of Economic Thought from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().