Microfoundations of Keynesian Economics
This book presents a new vision of Keynesian macroeconomics for readers seeking a rigorous yet intuitive understanding of economic stability and fluctuation. Moving beyond representative-agent models, it develops a monetary production economy in which firms adjust investment through confidence, coordination, and institutional constraints. The economy evolves through a sequence of short-period equilibria and stabilizes within a “corridor” shaped by real anchors, nominal rigidities, and financial structure.
Combining evolutionary investment dynamics, fairness-based wage setting, and a 100-percent-reserve monetary framework, the book offers a unified analysis of money, capital accumulation, and expectations. Rather than viewing instability as inherent indeterminacy, it highlights boundary proximity—how repeated encounters with institutional limits generate inflationary and deflationary pressures. The framework reconciles long-run monetary neutrality with persistent Keynesian asymmetries and provides new insights into classic debates associated with Keynes, Wicksell, Fisher, and Tobin.
Written for researchers and advanced students in macroeconomics, the book bridges formal analytical methods with economic intuition. It invites readers to rethink macroeconomic policy not as short-term demand management but as the design of institutions that contain fluctuations and sustain stability over time.
Dr. Ichiro Takahashi, Ph.D., is a Japanese economist specializing in Keynesian macroeconomics and its microfoundations. He studied under the late Prof. Walter P. Heller and trained in game theory with Prof. Vincent P. Crawford and Prof. Joel Sobel. He has taught economics in both the United States and Japan at Carnegie Mellon University, Soka University, and Chuo University. He is the author of An Artificial Wicksell--Keynes Macroeconomy: Integrating Business Cycle and Cumulative Process. Currently, he serves as an Emeritus Professor at Soka University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Research, Chuo University.