Keynes and Sraffa's 'Difficulties with J. H. Hollander'

The paper reports on Jacob H. Hollander's cooperation with John Maynard Keynes and Piero Sraffa in the preparation of the latter's edition of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo. The report is based on archive material from various sources, including the unpublished papers of Edwin Cannan, Piero Sraffa, Jacob H. Hollander, John Maynard Keynes, and Jacob Viner, and the archive of the Royal Economic Society. The archive material consulted by us shows that, put mildly, Jacob H. Hollander did not promote Sraffa's editorial project: he held back material which he had received from Frank Ricardo and did not disclose to Sraffa that he owned several important letters which he had privately purchased. Moreover, Sraffa was refused access to Ricardiana even after he had traced them down in laborious detective work to be in Hollander's possession. Hollander's unwillingness to cooperate with Sraffa considerably delayed the publication of the Ricardo edition.     

Removing an ‘insuperable obstacle’ in the way of an objectivist analysis: Sraffa's attempts at fixed capital *

Abstract

The paper discusses Sraffa's consecutive attempts in the late 1920s and early 1940s to tackle a problem which endangered his objectivist, surplus-based approach to the theory of value and distribution aimed at reviving the standpoint of the classical economists. Whilst with circulating capital the value transfer to the product and the physical ‘destruction’ of the input are one and the same thing, with fixed capital this is not so. Sraffa eventually overcame the difficulty in terms of the joint products-method. This allowed him to explain relative prices and the rate of profits strictly in ‘material terms’.     

Endogenous uncertainty in a general equilibrium model with price contingent contracts

Summary This paper views uncertainty and economic fluctuations as being primarily endogenous and internally propagated phenomena. The most important Endogenous Uncertainty examined in this paper is price uncertainty which arises when agents do not have structural knowledge and are complelled to make decisions on the basis of their beliefs. We assume that agents adopt Rational Beliefs as in Kurz [1994a]. The trading of endogenous uncertainty is accomplished by using Price Contingent Contracts (PCC) rather than the Arrow-Debreu state contingent contracts. The paper provides a full construction of the price state space which requires the expansion of the exogenous state space to include the state of beliefs. This construction is central to the analysis of equilibrium with endogenous uncertainty and the paper provides an existence theorem for a Rational Belief Equilibrium with PCC. It shows how the PCC completes the markets for trading endogenous uncertainty and lead to an allocation which is Pareto optimal. This paper also demonstrates that endogenous uncertainty is generically present in this new equilibrium.This research was supported in part by the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei of Milan, Italy, and by the National Science Council of Taiwan. The authors thank Carsten K. Nielsen for valuable suggestions.     

Auf der Schwelle zur „Vierten Industriellen Revolution“

The paper discusses some of the probable effects of what is sometimes called the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, based on cyber-physical systems and the internet of things. The attention focuses on their impact on the volume and composition of employment and the distribution of income. Some measures to ward off or mitigate socially harmful consequences of the new waves of technological change are discussed.