Abstract
This chapter unfolds a rich body of archival material—the 1926–1940 Ph.D. qualifying exams in Economic Theory at the University of Chicago—that sheds new light on the nature and evolution of interwar Chicago economics. The qualifying tests (supplemented by the courses’ programmes) show the existence of two important turning points in the shaping of the Chicago training. The first in 1927, when John M. Clark (the undisputed leader of the Chicago Department of Economics during the heyday of institutionalism) moved to Columbia University, which allowed the courses to be restructured according to a different and more analytical approach already represented in the Department by Jacob Viner and, in a narrower field, by Paul Douglas. The arrival at Chicago of figures such as Frank Knight, Henry Schultz and Henry Simons definitely shifted the balance towards neoclassical theory. A second turning point occurred in 1933 when the qualifying test in Economic Theory was divided into two major fields: price and distribution theory on the one side and money and business cycles on the other. The ‘Chicago monetary tradition’ began to emerge.
University of Palermo. Although this chapter is a joint effort by the authors, Sections 1, 2, and 6 can be attributed to Luca Fiorito, and Sections 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 to Sebastiano Nerozzi, who is also responsible for the editing of the archival material.
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Fiorito, L., Nerozzi, S. (2018). Chicago Economics in the Making, 1926–1940: A Further Look at United States Interwar Pluralism. In: Leeson, R. (eds) Hayek: A Collaborative Biography. Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95219-2_11
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