Profile Major Works Resources

Pierangelo Garegnani, 1930-2011  

 Italian Neo-Ricardian economist.

Originating from Milan, Italy, Pierangelo (or simply Piero) Garegnani studied at the University of Pavia, producing a master's thesis on David Ricardo. This won Garegnani a scholarship to continue his studies in 1953 at Trinity College, Cambridge, coming under the tutelage of Maurice Dobb, and (more influentially) Piero Sraffa.  Garegnani received his doctorate in 1958 with a massive dissertation on heterogeneous capital (which would yield several later papers).

Garegnani returned to Italy in 1958. A revised version of Garegnani's thesis was published (in Italian) in the same year (1960) as Sraffa's PCMC 

In 1961-62, a Rockefeller foundation grant brought Garegnani stayed to MIT, where he met future antagonists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow.  Garegnani helped launch the Cambridge critique (1966) of Neoclassical capital theory. Garegnani was a prominent leader of the Neo-Ricardian school, proposing to synthesize Keynes's theory of effective demand (at the macroeconomic level) and Sraffa's classical Ricardian theory of value (at the microeconomic level).

Garegnani held chairs at at Sassari (1962), Pavia (1966) and Florence (1970), before settling down in Rome-La Sapienza in 1974.  He was literary executor of Sraffa after the latter's death in 1983.  Garegnani was a frequent visiting professor at the New School during the 1980s.  In 1992, Garegnani became professor of economics at the newly-founded University of Roma Tre.

 

  

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Major Works of Pierangelo Garegnani

  • Il Capitale nelle Teorie della Distribuzione, 1960.
  • "Switching of Techniques", 1966, QJE.
  • "Heterogeneous Capital, the Production Function and the Theory of Distribution", 1970, RES.
  • "Nota Matematica", 1973, in Sylos-Labini, editor, Prezzi Relativi e Distribuzione del Reddito.
  • "On a Change in the Notion of Equilibrium in Recent Work on Value and Distribution", 1976, in Brown et al., editors, Essays in Modern Capital Theory.
  • "Notes on Consumption, Investment and Effective Demand I & II", 1978-9, Cambridge JE. (wr. 1964-65)
  • "On Hollander's Interpretation of Ricardo's Early Theory of Profits", 1982, Cambridge JE.
  • "Ricardo's Early Theory of Profit and its Rational Foundation: A reply to Hollander", 1983, Cambridge JE.
  • "The Classical Theory of Wages and the Role of Demand Schedules in the Determination of Relative Prices", 1983, AER.
  • "Value and Distribution in the Classical Economists and Marx", 1984, Oxford EP.
  • "Quantity of Capital", 1990, in Eatwell, Milgate and Newman, editors, New Palgrave: Capital Theory.
  • "On Some Supposed Obstacles to the Tendency of Market Prices Towards Natural Prices", 1990, in Caminati and Petri, editors, Convergence to Long Period Positions
  • "Sraffa: Classical versus Marginalist Analysis", 1990, in Bharadwaj and Schefold, editors, Essays on Piero Sraffa
  • "Some Notes for an Analysis of Accumulation", 1992, in Halevi et al, editors, Beyond the Steady State
  •  "Equilibrium in the classical conception and some supposed obstacles to the tendency of market prices toward natural prices", 1997, in G. Caravale, editor, Equilibrium and Economic Theory.

 

HET

 
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Resources on Pierangelo Garegnani

  • "Piero Garegnani (1930-2011)" by Heinz Kurz (pdf)
  • Garegnani obituary by Murray Milgate at RES
  • "Pierangelo Garegnani: A brief sketch of his career", by Murray Milgate, 2012, Contributions to Political Economy
  • Value, Distribution and Capital: Essays in honor of Pierangelo Garegnani, edited by Gary Mongiovi an Fabio Petri, 1999 [pdf]
  • Garegnani obituary at DailyKos
  • Wikipedia

 

 
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