author
Clément Juglar
1819–1905
Remembered as one of the first thinkers to study economic booms and busts as repeating patterns, he helped give shape to the modern idea of the business cycle. Trained as a physician, he brought a careful, statistical eye to trade and finance.
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About the author
Born in Paris on October 15, 1819, and dying there on February 28, 1905, Clément Juglar was a French physician, statistician, and economist. He is best known for some of the earliest systematic studies of recurring economic fluctuations, work that later gave rise to the term Juglar cycle for a medium-length business cycle.
What made his work stand out was the way he combined observation, statistics, and historical comparison. Rather than treating commercial crises as isolated accidents, he argued that expansion and contraction followed recognizable rhythms across countries and over time.
Juglar’s contributions were widely noticed in his lifetime, and he was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1892. His name still appears in economics today whenever scholars discuss the history of business-cycle theory and the long effort to understand why economies repeatedly swing between prosperity and downturn.