Founded in 1932 by a newspaper heir disillusioned by the failure of forecasters to predict the Great Crash, the Cowles Commission promoted the use of formal mathematical and statistical methods in economics, initially through summer research conferences in Colorado and through support of the...

This paper explores the development of dynamic modelling of macroeconomic fluctuations at the Cowles Commission from Roos, Dynamic Economics (Cowles Monograph No. 1, 1934) and Davis, Analysis of Economic Time Series (Cowles Monograph No. 6, 1941) to Koopmans, ed., Statistical Inference in...

Jacob Marschak shaped the emergence of monetary theory and portfolio choice at the Cowles Commission (which he directed from 1943 to 1948, but with which he was involved already from 1937) at the University of Chicago, where he was the doctoral teacher of Leonid Hurwicz, Harry Markowitz and Don...