Microfoundations of Keynesian Economics by Ichirô Takahashi

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.

This book develops a Keynesian framework for macroeconomic stability in a monetary production economy. Moving beyond representative-agent optimization, it models investment as an evolutionary process shaped by confidence, coordination, and institutional constraints. The economy evolves through short-period equilibria and converges in distribution rather than to a fixed steady state. Integrating balance-sheet consistency, fairness-sensitive wage setting, and stochastic dynamics, the analysis introduces “boundary proximity” to explain fluctuations and reconciles monetary neutrality with persistent Keynesian asymmetries.