Conclusions

Of course, there are other ways to organize this rather large literature including distin­guishing between market clearing and non-market clearing approaches (as in Aghion and Saint Paul 1998).

We could have paid more attention to optimal growth models and their attempt to exhibit (endogenous) cyclical dynamics. However, we decided to focus in our assessment of the modern literature on the analysis of cycles based on impulse/propagation mecha­nisms. There are several fundamental contributions developed from that perspective: (1) Benhabib and Nishimura (1979, 1985) who show that multisectoral models can exhibit oscillating dynamics sometimes even with periodicity, and (2) Benhabib and Day (1982) and Grandmont (1985) who show in overlapping-generations models that under certain conditions optimal trajectories can be cyclical in nature.

Another interesting literature strand that we have not so far mentioned includes work that starts from the assumption of long-run growth as an exogenous trend and then examines how fluctuations could be generated endogenously (see Shleifer 1986) and those papers that try to endogenize both cycles and growth dynamics (see Franςois and Lloyd-Ellis 2003).

Another (still) emerging field of research is founded on agent-based modelling (see Howitt and Gaffard 2007; Dosi et al. 2010). In this perspective, there is no doubt that the Schumpeterian idea that growth and cycles are indistinguishable dynamics, which so far has not been adequately modelled, is still of fundamental importance for modern research programs. What is less obvious is the extent to which those modern approaches can be interpreted as fully Schumpeterian contributions.

Michael Assous, Muriel Dal Font Legrand and Harald Hagemann