Based upon his life-long collaboration with Hyman Minsky, Piero Ferri explores and reconsiders Minsky's moments in the aftermath of the 'Great Recession' of 2008. He sets out the analytical and methodological foundations of Minsky's financial instability hypothesis, offering insightful comments from a unique insider s perspective. This book stresses the necessity of including what has been recently discovered about Minsky's financial instability hypothesis into his lifelong research program, in order to obtain a more complete picture of both his vision and his analytical apparatus. It seeks to move beyond a discussion of Minsky's original ideas, to verify how they are capable of meeting the challenges derived from the modern evolution of the economy. Developing a meta-model based on regime switching, Piero Ferri examines how the different financial instability hypotheses can be accounted for. Researchers and advanced students in macroeconomics and finance will greatly benefit from the exploration of how Minsky predicted the 'Great Recession', and why his work is of fundamental relevance today. Economic policy makers will also find this book to be a useful tool in discovering methodological innovations to aid further financial recovery from the 2008 economic crisis.

Piero Ferri expertly broadens the analysis of the canonical growth cycle approach by presenting a Minsky-Harrod model, examining how the relationship between income distribution, growth and unemployment becomes increasingly complex. Exploring this new technique to generate a process of growth, based not only on history but disequilibrium, he investigates the current income distribution debate further and the challenges it faces. Written in a succinct yet comprehensive style, Piero Ferri begins by addressing the basic principles, followed by an in-depth look at growth cycle models and how the Minsky-Harrod integrated model would help to unravel the current complexities. The empirical analysis reaches insightful conclusions by justifying the existence of a variety of results and by studying the distributive loop in a dynamic context which is prone to instability. Teachers of macroeconomics and scholars will find this an invaluable read and will benefit from the practical study and results. Researchers interested in labour economics and political economy will also find this a thought-provoking book.

This book studies the relationships between aggregate demand, inequality and instability. It extends the traditional approach by introducing wealth and inequality into a dynamic macroeconomic model. Furthermore, it examines the role that debt and financial instability can play in turbulent times such as the Great Recession and its aftermath. Unlike Piketty, the author analyzes the relationships between instability and inequality, and the feedbacks from the latter to the former, in a system approach where real and monetary factors interact to generate complex patterns. The book does not discover 'iron laws' because the results depend on the nature of the model, the values of the parameters and the policy pursued. However, the role of inequality is proven to play a decisive role in shaping dynamics. Finally, the author discusses the link between medium and long- run problems, and the challenges that remain to be faced. Piero Ferri's original application of economic principles to the topic of inequality will make this book essential reading for all economists, particularly those of a macro orientation.

The initial purposes of this book were to update and extend the discussion and the results presented ill our previous book, The Labor Market and Business Cycle Theories. Our 1990 article, which appeared in The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, represented a first step in this direction. The consequences of this effort have materialized in a number of new chapters that has led de facto to a new book, in which the surviving parts have been largely revised. The 1989 book was too mathematically oriented for many Keynesians and post Keynesians to be fully appreciated and insufficiently microfounded for both new classicals and new-Keynesians to be warmly accepted, yet we received positive and encouraging comments, and it was sold out very quickly. It was an attempt to dis cuss dynamics in Keynesian terms, based on a double assumption that maintains its validity-that both economic facts and analytical and methodological innova tions had contributed to a renewed interest in business cycles, which over time has had its "ups and downs." Since then, many more articles and books have appeared, stressing in particular the role of microfoundations and of nonlinearities in shaping business cycle theory.

The papers in this volume were presented at a conference on "The EMS, Ten Years Later" at the University of Bergamo, Italy, May 1989. They look at the history of the EMS, the reasons underlying the successes attributed to it, the problems it created, and its future.

In light of the recent economic crisis and in keeping with Hyman Minsky's analysis of financial instability, this book considers the important interaction between cycles and growth, via the interplay between demand, supply and real-world financial issues. Piero Ferri presents a macroeconomic study of a monetary production economy within a dynamic paradigm, where instability phenomena and inhibitive policy measures interact, and where the forces that self-regulate markets cannot prevent the occurrence of instability problems. Underpinning this paradigm is the idea that such volatility is the result of endogenous forces; shocks can trigger instability but cannot explain its persistence. As endogenous instability has multiple causes and mechanisms of transmission, the author adopts various perspectives - both analytical and by means of simulation - in order to explore and characterize the phenomenon of growth cycles and instability. This challenging book will prove a thought-provoking read for students and scholars of macroeconomics, heterodox economics, labor markets and money, finance and banking. Contents: Preface; Introduction; Part I: The Background; 1. Dynamics in the Medium Run; 2. Financial Instability; 3. Macroeconomics, Uncertainty and the Fallacies of Composition; 4. Heterogeneity and the Status of Macroeconomics; Part II: The Markets; 5. The Nature of the Labor Market; 6. The Role of Imperfect Competition; 7. Policies versus Self-Adjustment; Part III: Endogenous Dynamics; 8. A Dynamic Macro Model; 9. Uncertainty, Expectations and Learning; 10. Inflation, Deflation and the Phillips Curve; Part IV: Growth Cycles, Income Share and the Financial Instability Hypothesis; 11. A Growth Cycle Model; 12. The Role of Labor Share; 13. Towards a Stochastic Switching; Part V: Concluding Remarks; 14. Lessons; 15. The Task Ahead