Macroeconomics and Behavioural Economics: An Alternative Programme for Microfoundations?

This article investigates a set of theoretical proposals, spanning from the early 1980s to the today, aiming at integrating the insights of behavioural economics into the field of macroeconomics, and most particularly into the study of the business cycle and of monetary policy. The various economists participating to this endeavour (such as, among others, Robert Shiller, George Akerlof, and Paul de Grauwe) have adopted the label "behavioural macroeconomics" to characterize their own individual work, but also to brand collective initiatives, such as seminars (notably a series of conferences in the 1990s, hosted by the NBER), ultimately, making "behavioural macroeconomics" even became a JEL code (2014-2017). This article makes two contributions to the history of macroeconomics. The first is to document the history of the "behavioural macroeconomics" research field, which has been, so far, overlooked by historians. The second contribution of our article is to analyse the theoretical contributions of behavioural macroeconomists to the quest for microfoundations—that is, the quest of a theoretical linkage between individual behaviour and macroeconomic phenomena. More specifically, we investigate whether or not behavioural macroeconomics constituted a consistent and alternative microfoundational programme with respect to the other microfoundational programmes already identified by historians.