Bent Hansen's The Economic Theory of Fiscal Policy contains a macroeconomic model, based on optimising agents, to analyse how fiscal policy can be used to secure full employment and a constant value of money. Focus is on the coordination of economic policy. In addition to giving an account of Hansen's analysis, the choice of model (equilibrium model, inflation model or a Keynesian unemployment model) is discussed. The role of and the modelling of monetary policy is treated, and the possibility of implementing the policy.

Assar Lindbeck's dissertation is strongly influenced mainly by Don Patinkin's and Bent Hansen's way of macroeconomic analysis using a neoclassical general equilibrium model. Monetary theory is developed in the spirit of Gurley & Shaw with a number of financial intermediaries, like banks and insurance companies. The quantity of money is consequently endogenous. An important part of the dissertation contains an analysis of the effects of different regulations of credit.

Bent Hansen's analysis of repressed and open inflation was to some extent based on microeconomics, he analysed the interaction between wage and price inflation and discussed economic policy problems when there were goals in addition to that of curbing inflation. Hansen was influenced by Erik Lindahl who, like the other members of the Stockholm School was critical to the quantity theory of money. Hansen's book contains early analyses of spill-over effects and building blocks of the supply multiplier.

John Maynard Keynes made and important contribution one hundred years ago in his book  The Economic Consequences of the Peace when he pointed out that it would be impossible for Germany to fulfill the reparations payments according to the Versailles treaty. Keynes also played an important role when it comes to the new view of the 1930s of the business cycle and the shaping of stabilization policy. But Keynesianism also caused the respect for restraint in public borrowing to disappear. The great public debts within EU together with the common currency implies certain similarities with the conditions during the end of the 1920s.