Call for Papers
Dear
list members,
The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought invites
submissions for a special issue.
Coordination
Issues in Historical Perspectives
Research programs,
debates and the fate of a protean concept
Since the days of Adam Smith (at least), economists have
considered the price
mechanism as a constitutive device for coordinating activities
in complex
market systems. Yet, it has also been noted that the price
mechanism, as
envisaged in ‘pure theory’, fails in many cases to coordinate
intratemporal and
intertemporal decisions, and that different mechanisms and modes
may then (have
to) come to operate in a substitutive or a complementary
fashion. Issues of
coordination failures and alternative mechanisms have received
variable
attention over time. They have sometimes been at the very heart
of research
programs and sometimes been totally bypassed. Intertemporal
coordination
failures, in particular, have been at the core of
macroeconomics. While
(neo-)classical economics argued that persistent unemployment
has its roots in
exogenous restrictions of price flexibility, Keynes (1936)
questioned the role of
price and wage adjustment as forces of self-correction, showing
that wage and
price flexibility could in fact have destabilizing effects
(Howitt 2001).
Keynes’ ideas paved the way for a long-term research program,
making other
economists think about coordination failures of the price
mechanism in terms of
disequilibrium adjustments. Lucas (1972), on the other hand,
offered a
framework based on Walrasian general equilibrium theory in which
coordination
issues were reduced to transitory problems resulting from
informational
imperfections. When Keynesian approaches regained attention in
the 1980s and
1990s, the reference to disequilibrium dynamics had disappeared.
Coordination
issues came to be addressed in terms of multiple equilibria
analysis. While
microeconomics underwent profound changes through work in
behavioral economics,
experimental economics, agents-based modelling and other
approaches that permit
to investigate coordination issues in its realm, modern standard
macroeconomics
appears to leave many of the systemic coordination failures that
were
considered as relevant in the past out of its focus, if not its
scope.
Following the award of an honorary doctorate from the University
of Côte d'Azur
(CNRS GREDEG) to Professor Peter Howitt on 8 September 2022, a
workshop will be
organised in cooperation with EJHET, the European
Journal of the
History of Economic Thought, on 9 and 10 September 2022.
The workshop will
bring together contributions that offer historical perspectives
of the
treatment of coordination issues in micro- and macroeconomics.
Papers on
specific research programs and modelling strategies or on
debates and
controversies in their historical context are welcome. A
selection of the
papers will be published in an EJHET special issue in
2023.
Proposals for papers (between 700 and 1000 words) should
be submitted by
email to [log in to unmask]
no later than 15 March 2022.
Authors whose proposal is accepted (by the end of March / early
April) will be
expected to send a full paper by 15 August 2022.
A selection of papers will be discussed during a workshop at
Université Côte
d’Azur, CNRS GREDEG (Nice, France) on 9-10
September 2022.
Final papers are to be submitted to EJHET by 15
December 2022
and will then be reviewed in line with the regular procedures of
the journal.
https://bit.ly/3r6XieP
The Editorial Committee for the EJHET special issue on
Coordination Issues in Historical Perspectives:
Muriel Dal Pont Legrand ([log in to unmask])
Hans-Michael Trautwein ([log in to unmask])