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The purpose of this paper is to determine how including the Greek financial crisis in teaching introductory macroeconomics benefits students.

The methodology is based on the responses of a recent survey administered to students at a university in Greece.

An eclectic approach that distinguishes various economic theories and methodologies, mainly neoclassical and Keynesian, can provide a pedagogical way of teaching introductory macroeconomics, allowing students to use their everyday personal experiences in determining the most “suitable” theory in explaining the crisis.

To the author’s knowledge, such an exercise of discovering students’ perceptions of teaching an introductory macroeconomics Substitute with course during the global financial crisis has not yet been attempted.

Using recent literature, examines developments in seven macroeconomic schools of thought: orthodox Keynesian, monetarist, new classical, real business cycle theory, new Keynesian, Austrian and post‐Keynesian. Describes all of these and classifies them as orthodox, new or radical. After setting out the differences, discusses the degree of agreement between the schools of thought. Concludes that macroeconomics is constantly evolving, resulting in new disagreements requiring a new consensus.

The paper aims to offer a new perspective on the strictly microeconomic nature of all of Islamic economics. Writers in this field continue to work in the mainstream tradition without noticing the micro‐interface of the theoretical nature of Islamic economics. This paper aims to address this issue.

The paper provides a comparative study of received literature in the history of economic thought and contrasts the ethical foundations of Islamic economics from the mainstream dichotomy between microeconomic and macroeconomic parts.

There is a cogent microeconomic foundation of Islamic economics for the economy‐wide treatment of ethical economic issues and problems including the policy framework.

This is a theoretical exploration. The empirical part is yet to be expanded upon.

The paper has practical implications for graduate students on policy formulation and economic theorizing, by making them analytically aware on the extensive relevance of microeconomics in the building block of ethical content of economic theory, policy and institutions.

The paper presents original thinking along lines of microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic theory from the social and ethical vantage points of Islamic economics and finance that writers in this field should not ignore. The paper is meant for serious students and academics of economic theory and ethical social policy embedded in the economic treatment.

Although the global economic crisis that began in 2007 has renewed interest in Keynes among the wider educated public, graduate courses in macroeconomics usually teach little about Keynes and the issues he analyzed, and what little they teach is often wrong (e.g., that Keynes assumed an arbitrarily fixed money wage rate or that he ignored expectations). Consequently, as macroeconomists turn their attention to the possibility, causes and consequences of financial crises and global depression, they do not have access to the insights into these questions produced by earlier generations of economists. The time and attention constraints of theory courses do not allow simply directing the students to the extensive scholarly literature on the economics of Keynes, so this paper offers a suggested introduction to the economics of Keynes for a graduate course in macroeconomics.

F. A. Hayek’s macroeconomic theory and policy ideas have gained renewed attention since the cheap-money boom until 2007, and subsequent bust, followed the basic Hayekian narrative. Only to a very limited extent, however, do we find Hayek’s ideas on the agenda of mainstream macroeconomic researchers since Robert Lucas’s research program gave way to “Neoclassical” and “New Keynesian” DSGE models. We find examples of deeper interest on the periphery of the mainstream. Hayek’s influence on today’s macroeconomic policy discussions remains similarly limited, although he has become an icon to some opponents of loose monetary policy.

This analysis attempts a comparative specification of certain aspects of the country studies contained in this volume. The point of departure is the banking crises of the early 1990s (deep in Finland, Norway and Sweden, mini-crisis in Denmark and absent in Iceland) and the contrast to Iceland's financial meltdown in 2007/2008 (no crisis in the three, a new mini-crisis in Denmark). Detailed process tracing of the Icelandic crisis is provided. The case account is then used to shed light on the different roles of neoliberalism, economics expert knowledge and populist right-wing party formation in the five Nordic political economies.

For nearly 80 years, the field of macroeconomics has largely been shaped by the aftermath of the Keynesian revolution. Many economists have argued that this revolution and the subsequent internal and external disputes it has sparked have had the unfortunate side effect of crowding out much of what was good in macro-level analysis before it, leading to the dissatisfactory state of macroeconomics we have today. In the search for alternative paths for macroeconomics, I focus on two separate but compatible traditions: monetary disequilibrium (MD) theory and the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). I argue that scholars in these traditions employed a far richer micro-theoretic explanation for the business cycle well before Keynes’s General Theory. Unfortunately, their ideas were not united in time to mount a sufficient counterattack to the Keynesian crusade. My goal is to unite the best elements of these two traditions by providing what I believe is the “missing link” that can help connect these alternative paths: free banking theory.

This chapter investigates the nature of the transformation of macroeconomics by focusing on the impact of the Great Depression on economic doctrines. There is no doubt that the Great Depression exerted an enormous influence on economic thought, but the exact nature of its impact should be examined more carefully. In this chapter, I examine the transformation from a perspective which emphasizes the interaction between economic ideas and economic events, and the interaction between theory and policy rather than the development of economic theory. More specifically, I examine the evolution of what became known as macroeconomics after the Depression in terms of an ongoing debate among the “stabilizers” and their critics. I further suggest using four perspectives, or schools of thought, as measures to locate the evolution and transformation; the gold standard mentality, liquidationism, the Treasury view, and the real-bills doctrine. By highlighting these four economic ideas, I argue that what happened during the Great Depression was the retreat of the gold standard mentality, the complete demise of liquidationism and the Treasury view, and the strange survival of the real-bills doctrine. Each of those transformations happened not in response to internal debates in the discipline, but in response to government policies and real-world events.