Abstract: Fashions in economic research, as in other disciplines, often run in cycles. Such is the case with inventories. Modern interest in inventory behavior was stimulated by Metzler's (1941) demonstration that an inventory accelerator mechanism can produce cycles in simple Keynesian models. Empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period when the U.S. economy's cyclical fluctuations looked much like Metzlerian inventory cycles.
Author(s): Alan S. Blinder and Louis J. Maccini
