This paper examines the rise of the VAR approach from a historical perspective. It shows that the VAR approach arises as a systematic solution to the issue of 'model choice' bypassed by Cowles Commission (CC) researchers, and that the approach essentially inherits and enhances the CC legacy...

This paper discusses a longstanding debate between two empirical approaches to macroeconomics: the econometrics program represented by Lawrence R. Klein, and the statistical economics program represented by Milton Friedman. I argue that the differences between these two approaches do not consist...

The 1960s were the glorious age of large-scale, "economy-wide" macroeconometric models, which enabled forecasts and simulations of the quantitative effects of certain policy changes within systems of simultaneous equations. This paper is concerned (1) with the form and character of the kind of...

The potted histories of macroeconomics textbooks are typically Keynes-centric. Keynes is credited with founding macroeconomics, and the central developments in the field through the early 1970s, including large-scale macroeconometric models are usually termed "Keynesian." The story of...

We study the construction of the macroeconometric model of the Committee on Economic Stability (CES) of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in the early 1960s using the CES's archival records. Building this model was central not only to set the bases for the subsequent construction of...

A popular view of models among economists and philosophers alike is that all models are false, but some are useful. Models are frequently treated as convenient fictions, idealizations, stories about credible worlds, or "near enough" to the truth. But such a understandings pose serious questions,...

In this dissertation, I place macroeconometric modeling at the center of the history of twentieth century macroeconomics, i.e. as a history of macroeconometrics, and ask two central questions: (1) What exactly were the objectives and the forces driving the development of macroeconometric...

The paper provides a short account of the major complete macroeconometric models that have been constructed in Australia. Initially these were by academics but later both the Treasury and Reserve Bank of Australia developed these for policy analysis and forecasting, so that the history focuses a...

The paper investigates how the Fed-MIT-Penn model incorporated the Phillips curve within its larger system of equations, after Milton Friedman's Presidential Address. Forder (2014) reconstructs the history of the Phillips curve's parabola arguing that the standard narrative is a myth; a myth he...

This paper discusses a longstanding debate between two empirical approaches to macroeconomics: the econometrics program represented by Lawrence R. Klein, and the statistical economics program represented by Milton Friedman. I argue that the differences between these two approaches do not consist...