Gustav Cassel

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Gustav Cassel

Born 20 October 1866 (1866-10-20)
Stockholm, Sweden
Died 14 January 1945 (aged 78)
Fields Economics
Institutions Stockholm University
Alma mater Uppsala University
Doctoral students Gösta Bagge, Gunnar Myrdal, Bertil Ohlin
Known for Purchasing power parity,
work on interest

Karl Gustav Cassel (20 October 1866 - 14 January 1945) was a Swedish economist and was professor of economics at Stockholm University.

Cassel's perspective on economic reality, and especially on the role of interest, was rooted in British neoclassicism and in the nascent Swedish schools. He is perhaps best know through John Maynard Keynes' article Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), in which he raised the idea of purchasing power parity. He was also a founding member of the Swedish school of economics, along with Knut Wicksell and David Davidson. Cassel came to economics from mathematics. He earned an advanced degree in mathematics from Uppsala University and was made professor at Stockholm University during the late 1890s but went to Germany before the turn of the century to study economics, publishing papers spanning just under forty years.
Among his other contributions apart from the rudiments of a purchasing power parity theory of exchange rates (1921). He produced an 'overconsumption' theory of the trade cycle (1918) and Nature and Necessity of Interest (1903). He also worked on the German reparations problem.

Some of his notable students include Nobel Prize in Economics laureates Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal, and the future Moderate Party leader Gösta Bagge.