The Genesis of Samuelson and Solow’s Price-Inflation Phillips Curve: Rejoinder to Hall and Hart

Abstract

My paper (Hoover 2015) was only in part a comment on Hall and Hart's (2012) paper. Its other independent purpose was simply to clarify Samuelson and Solow's construction of their price-inflation Phillips curve. Hall and Hart make it clear in their 'Reply' that they are not interested in those aspects of my paper, but rather merely want to ask whether, using econometric techniques available in 1959-60, Samuelson and Solow (1960) could have produced the Phillips curve that they reported in their original paper. Hall and Hart show that a simple bivariate, quadratic regression in the inverse of the unemployment rate would not produce Samuelson and Solow's hyperbolic curve, but rather a hump-shaped curve. It is, however, an odd understanding of what constitutes the state of the art in econometrics in 1960 to think that the 'techniques available at the time' should be glossed as the specific regression that Hall and Hart estimate. In fact, there is every reason to believe that a sophisticated econometrician circa 1960 would have rejected Hall and Hart's regressions as spurious artifacts that, far from providing a 'challenge [to] the results as well as the policy implications of the Samuelson-Solow Phillips curve' (Hall and Hart 2012: 67), cannot be legitimately interpreted as bearing any usable economic interpretation.