The journal of the Econometric Society, Econometrica, was established in 1933 and edited by Ragnar Frisch for the first 22 years. As a new journal Econometrica had three key characteristics. First, it was devoted to a research program stated in few but significant words in the constitution of...

Ragnar Frisch's concept of econometrics was broader in scope than the more restricted connotation it has today as a sub-discipline of economics, it may be more properly rendered as a reconstruction of economics along principles inspired and drawn from natural sciences. In this reconstruction an...

Why were the rating agencies trusted? When they became required for Federal deposit insurance their incentives for upward bias was common knowledge. The requirement was attacked by a Chicago economist, Melchior Palyi, on philosophical grounds (the expertise is excessively secret) and technical...

Why were the rating agencies trusted? When they became required for Federal deposit insurance their incentives for upward bias was common knowledge. The requirement was attacked by a Chicago economist, Melchior Palyi, on philosophical grounds (the expertise is excessively secret) and technical...

I examine two competing proposals for reforming and reviving confidence in the international monetary regime. Robert Triffin introduced and championed the proposal for centralized reserves. Fritz Machlup championed the proposal for flexible rates originally introduced by Milton Friedman. Triffin...

From the early 1960s onwards, Arnold Zellner has been publishing papers in the areas of statistical theory, econometric applications and macroeconomic modelling. This conversation canvasses Zellner's transition from physics to economics, the reason for the renewal of interest in Bayes's theorem...

In this paper we address the story of developments in general equilibrium theory (GET) in the USSR during the 1970s through the lens of a single biography. The Soviet advances in mathematical economics, only fragmentarily known in the West, give an occasion to reflect on the extension of the...

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on the intellectual history of the economics discipline in Brazil and its p, in the early 1980s lace within the network of international transmission of economic ideas, by delving into the history of the Kaldor-Pazos-Simonsen mechanism, namely: the...

Pawel Ciompa's conception of econometrics is compared with the modern mainstream interpretation of the term that originated with Ragnar Frisch and other members of the Econometric Society. Ciompa was the first to use the German language term “Oekonometrie” in 1910, sixteen years prior to...

Since graduating with a PhD in Economics from Cambridge, Hashem Pesaran has been a prominent contributor to the theoretical econometrics literature, undertaking work on testing of non-nested models, cointegration, forecasting in the presence of model instability, forecasting of multinomial data,...