Apart from followers as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Coase, and Maurice Allais, most economists abandoned Irving Fisher’s economic framework after the post-1929 Great Crisis. Without citing Fisher however, in 1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller reutilised his framework to found...

Unlike standard accounts, recent research in the history of macroeconomics has given increasing attention to the Old Keynesians’ criticisms of the New Classical Economics. In this paper, I address the case of Edmond Malinvaud, who began opposing the latter from the early 1980s and did so...

Macroeconomics is said to exert a decisive influence on policy-makers/-making through economic expertise. This influence is usually assumed or taken for granted in- and outside academic circles. Yet, the reverse proposal, i.e. policy-makers’ influence on macroeconomics, appears to be far less...

Edmond Malinvaud’s case is peculiar in the history of Macro as he committed to two different microfoundational programs, namely the disequilibrium theory (more properly, the non-Walrasian approach) and the practice of large-scale macroeconomic modeling. Such a twofold commitment was far from...

How to infer from uncontrolled data the numerical values of the parameters of an econometric model? In interwar econometrics, this problem of statistical induction was tackled in various ways. In this article, I examine Wassily Leontief's interindustry method as a case study of a...

Although involved in projects of influent institutions like the Cowles Commission, the NBER, and the Michigan Survey Research Center (SRC), George Katona, the "pioneer student and chief collector of consumer anticipations data" (Tobin, 1959, p. 1) is virtually absent from accounts of the topics...

The concept of 'the core' originates in cooperative game theory and its introduction to economics in the 1960s as a basis for proofs of existence of general equilibrium is one of the earliest attempts to use game theory to address big questions in economics. Discovery of the core was met with...

Little is known about the relationship between Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of Economics and one of the three fathers of marginal utility theory, and Karl Menger, whose Vienna Mathematical Colloquium was crucial to the development of mathematical economics. The present paper...

In the paper, Edwin B. Wilson's influence on the rise of mathematical economics in America between the 1920s and 1940s is explored. The focus is laid on showing how on the grounds of his foundational ideas about science Wilson worked at the organizational and educational fronts to modernize...

Combining concrete policy-oriented modeling strategies of World War II with what was received as traditional neoclassical theory, in 1956 Robert Solow constructed a simple, clean, and smooth-functioning "design" model that served many different purposes. As a working object it enabled...