This paper discusses the role played by NY Fed economist Robert Roosa and Paul Samuelson in the emergence of the literature on credit rationing at the beginning of the 1950s. I argue that, contrary to the story one can find in the technical surveys, an intermediate step between Roosa and the...

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...

As innovation and technology management grow in complexity the need for inter-organizational cooperation increases. Part of this cooperation requires the understanding of how knowledge management and learning processes may function to support a successful research and development collaboration....

This paper seeks to convince historians that asking how tractability has shaped individual and collective modeling choices in economics is a worthy question. To do so, I first survey the economic methodology literature on tractability, one that grew out of methodologists’ attempts to dissect...

The FMP model exemplifies the Keynesian models later criticized by Lucas, Sargent and others as conceptually flawed. For economists in the 1960s such models were “big science”, posing organizational as well as theoretical and empirical problems. It was part of an even larger industry in...