Keynesian Behavioral Macroeconomics

Keynesian Behavioral Macroeconomics analyses Keynes’s landmark contributions in behavioral economics and develops a new and fresh genre of macroeconomic analysis. It compels us to consider seriously the earlier-generation warnings about the impact of investors’ animal spirits and financiers’ liquidity-presence using cognitive-based and social psychology heuristics. Innovative in its subject matter, approach, theoretical development and policy prescriptions, this constructivist pluralist approach can contribute to important debates. This fresh look in macroeconomics can fruitfully be applied by macroeconomists, policymakers, and market participants to prevent effective demand shortages, stimulate the economy, preserve job creation, and impact redistribution, sustainability and social inclusion. In this timely book, Theodore Koutsobinas develops a synthesis of Keynes’s macroeconomic theory with contemporary developments in behavioral macroeconomics to analyze urgent real-world challenges, and he proposes successful solutions for macroeconomic policy. This volume uniquely explains how Keynes’s magnificent, crucial, but long-forgotten dynamics can be analyzed on the basis of behavioral foundations to explain amplified global finance cycles, booms and busts, and macroeconomic instability with harmful effects on incomes and jobs. It builds constructively and systematically over three decades on themes identified and introduced first by Keynes, then his Cambridge disciples such as Kahn and Kaldor, and later elaborated on by notable Keynesian and Post Keynesian scholars such as Davidson, Minsky and Tobin and relating them to cognitive and social psychology. It will be a valuable and lively reading resource for students, scholars, policymakers and market practitioners interested in fresh and growing outlooks in macroeconomic analysis amidst fast technological changes, globalization, financialization and geopolitical repercussions, as well as in overlapping themes in related fields such as in economic theory, financial economics, public policy, economic psychology and political economy.