DID IRVING FISHER REALLY DISCOVER THE PHILLIPS CURVE?

Abstract

Economic lore has it that, with his 1926 article, “A Statistical Relation between Unemployment and Price Changes,” Irving Fisher “discovered the Phillips curve.” Did he? This paper argues he did not, for two reasons. One: the statistical relationship between inflation and unemployment that Fisher described in his 1926 article was contemporaneously described by Alvin Hansen, Henri Fuss, John Rotherford Bellerby, and Arthur Pigou in their own studies. Two: the statistical relationship that Fisher, Hansen, Fuss, Bellerby, and Pigou described is substantially different from the statistical relationship that Alban William Phillips described in his famous 1958 paper, as well as the many variations of the Phillips curve in the literature, including today’s conventional expectations-augmented Phillips curve. To correct the economic lore, the work of Fisher, Hansen, Fuss, Bellerby, and Pigou on the statistical relationship between inflation and unemployment and Phillips’s 1958 paper should be viewed as separate contributions.