Lerner, Abba Ptachya [key], 1903–82, American economist, b. Romania. After studying at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, he collaborated with Keynes at Cambridge. Lerner came to the United States in 1937. His book on market pricing in a socialist economy, The Economics of Control (1944), developed the Marshall–Lerner criterion, based on the elasticity principle of Alfred Marshall. Lerner explained how a nation's balance of trade could affect the exchange rate in an economy where the currency has been devalued. In the late 1970s, Lerner wrote a highly detailed and respected work on inflation, The Market Anti-Inflation Plan.
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