The two brothers, Gustav Åkerman and Johan Henryk Åkerman, made distinct contributions to Swedish economic theory.
A student of Wicksell's, Åkerman proposed in his 1923-4 dissertation to integrate fixed and durable capital into the circulating capital model of Wicksell - which he claimed would eliminate those troublesome "Wicksell Effects". His work prompted Wicksell to reconsider his own theory of capital, attempting a reformulation in a famous "Note on Dr. Åkerman" (1923). Åkerman went on to teach at G$B‹U(Beborg, continuing his work on the theory of capital (1931), thereafter turning to history.
The younger Åkerman was distinctly more original than his elder brother. Åkerman's dissertation, Rhythmics of Economic Life (1928), announced his life-long interest in business cycle theory (e.g. 1931). There was, in his view, a strict synchronization between short and long cycles. Åkerman's attempts to formulate a theory would involve incorporating a prescient concern with an endogenous business cycle theory reliant in part upon seasonal cycles which, he argued, were correlated with and could propagate large and longer economic swings. This vision of synchronized cycles was severely critized by Ragnar Frisch (1931). Although largely ignored outside Sweden, Åkerman's "causal association" (1931) theory is a precedent to very recent work on seasonal cycles. Åkerman was also the first to identify the "political business cycle" (1947), a result for which he is better known in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Åkerman also pursued more expansive work In his two monumental volumes on economic theory (1939, 1944), he attempts a sweeping theory of historical and structural change and how that, in turn, determines specific economic phenomena. This made him quite critical of the pure theory and the cavalier aggregation methods of the Stockholm School (see Åkerman (1953) and the subsequent debate in the Ekonomisk Tidskrift). Åkerman's works include a concern with methodology, epistemology and institutional factors that is akin to, but not superseded, by Myrdal. His work, much of it published in Swedish, German or French and often littered with his unique jargon, has had a far greater impact on the Continent than the English-speaking world. Johan Åkerman was professor at the University of Lund - Wicksell's old home - and it was Åkerman and his approach which characterized what is known as the "Lund School" (as opposed to "Stockholm School").
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