Samuelson's Last Macroeconomic Model: Secular Stagnation and Endogenous Cyclical Growth

Michaël Assous (), Mauro Boianovsky and Marwil Dávila-Fernández
Additional contact information
Michaël Assous: TRIANGLE - Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - IEP Lyon - Sciences Po Lyon - Institut d'études politiques de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UJM - Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: On the occasion of the centennial of his mentor Alvin Hansen, Paul Samuelson published in 1988 a modified version of his seminal 1939 multiplier-accelerator model to address aspects of Hansen's secular stagnation hypothesis. The ``Keynes-Hansen-Samuelson'' model (or KHS, as he called it) was built to analyse the effects of population growth on the economy's trajectory. Several changes were then made. Instead of difference equations and a tight accelerator, as in his 1939 model, Samuelson deployed differential equations and a flexible accelerator to produce a nonlinear limit cycle. Despite Samuelson's strong claims for the analytical contributions of his 1988 paper, it has - in contrast with the 1939 model - received only scant attention by macroeconomists and historians of economics alike. Samuelson's 1988 paper was his last published macroeconomic model, based on his long-established tradition of non-optimising macro-dynamics. Our paper provides a close reading of that article and some analytical results that shed new light on the formal aspects of Samuelson's 1988 model. We also discuss how it historically links up with business cycle models advanced by John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Roy Harrod and Richard Goodwin and examine how far Samuelson's use of the term secular stagnation differs from Larry Summers's recent reconstruction of it.

Keywords: Flexible accelerator; Hansen; Samuelson; Stagnation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2024, 69 (June), pp.417-426. ⟨10.1016/j.strueco.2024.02.014⟩

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

Related works:
Journal Article: Samuelson's last macroeconomic model: Secular stagnation and endogenous cyclical growth (2024)
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:hal:journl:halshs-04633718

DOI: 10.1016/j.strueco.2024.02.014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().