Economics in Europe has encountered a process of internationalisation since the 1970s. To a certain extent, this internationalisation is also an ‘Americanisation’ and many European departments and economics have adopted the standards of US economics, notably mathematical modelling, the use of econometrics, and the neoclassical theory as a modelling benchmark. Regarding this process, we can wonder if European economics has just been mimicking US economics since the 1970s, or if some European specialities have survived or emerged.
The objective of the project is to map the different channels through which economics influences the Bank and to understand how economic ideas impact (or do not impact) policy-making
Building an online interactive platform displaying bibliometric data on a large set of macroeconomic articles. Our goal is to settle the basis for a broad and long-run project on the history of macroeconomics, as well as to bring to historians tools to run quantitative inquiries to support their own research work.
This post comes back to my article "From the Stagflation to the Great Inflation" and proposes to navigate in the stagflation dataset I have built. Here, you can play interactively with the coupling and cocitation networks of my article.
The objective of the project is to map the different channels through which economics influences the Bank and to understand how economic ideas impact (or do not impact) policy-making
This article proposes a history of the evolution of macroeconomists’ explanations of the 1970s US stagflation, from 1975 to 2013. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, 1) I observe the different types of explanations coexisting at different periods ; 2) I assess which was the dominant type of explanations for each period ; and 3) I identify the main sources of influence for the different types of explanation. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, supply-shocks and inflation inertia were fundamental concepts to explain stagflation. The interest on this topic progressively vanished after 1985. In the 1990s, it was a totally new literature which emerged almost without any reference to past explanations. This literature focused on the role played by monetary policy in the late 1960s and the 1970s to account for the rise of inflation. New Classical economists’ contributions, like Lucas (1976), Kydland and Prescott (1977) or Barro and Gordon (1983a), which were ignored by stagflation explanations in the 1970s/1980s, became major references to account for the 1970s stagflation in the 1990s.
The International Seminar on Macroeconomics (ISoM) is an annual conference, which was co-sponsored during 15 years (1978-1993) by the French EHESS and the NBER. This article uncovers the scientific and institutional dynamics unrolling from this cooperation. We argue that macroeconomists gathered by the ISoM contributed greatly to the making of a European network of economists sharing similar professional and intellectual standards. We illustrate how the ISoM stood at the crossroad of two types of ‘internationalisation’ of economics: the integration of European national communitiesand the process of ‘Americanisation’ of economics. While existing literature on ‘internationalisation’ focuses on the national level, our contribution investigates the European level. Moreover, we unveil how two research programmes in macroeconomics (namely the disequilibrium theory and large-scale macroeconometric modelling) played a significant role in this process.
This article explores Robert E. Lucas’s policy agenda and his engagement with the public debate between the 1970s and early 1980s. It investigates how he interacted with the public debate by envisioning key principles of his macroeconomic theory and methodology, and how he promoted his policy agenda. An exploration of Lucas’s personal and professional archives sheds light on his participation in policy debates after the publication of his works, illustrating how Lucas built a discreet and cautious way of engaging with the public. Lucas did not propose a detailed program to implement his policy agenda, nor was he actively promoting his policy agenda. The article suggests that Lucas’s originality compared to his contemporaries was his belief on the ability of macroeconomics to scientifically devise binding policy rules that could be integrated in an economic constitution.
In 1976, Robert Lucas explicitly criticized Keynesian macroeconometric models for their inability to correctly predict the effects of alternative economic policies. Today, most contemporary macroeconomists and some historians of economics consider that Lucas’s critique led forcefully to an immediate disqualification of the Keynesian macroeconometric approach. This narrative is based on the interpretation of the Lucas critique as a fundamental principle for economic reasoning that was (and still is) logically unquestionable. We consider that this narrative is problematic both in terms of historiography and the effects that it can have in the field as a way of assigning importance and credit to particular macroeconomists. Indeed, the point of view of the Keynesian economists is missing despite the fact that they were the target of Lucas’s paper and that throughout the 1970s and 1980s they produced a fierce reaction against it. In this article we analyze the reactions by a broad set of authors (which we label “Keynesians”) that disputed the relevance of the critique. In spite of their diversity in methodological, theoretical, and policy issues, these reactions were characterized by their common questioning of the empirical and practical relevance of the Lucas critique.
Lucas and Sargent’s “After Keynesian Macroeconomics” is considered as a cornerstone of macroeconomics history and is supposed to have seriously undermined “Keynesian” approach to macroeconometric modelling. I study the context of this article, its writing, its presentation in a conference with many advocates of large-scale models and the debates that followed. I demonstrate that the issue of stagflation was closely linked to Lucas and Sargent’s argument, and the opposition of “Keynesians” relied on their different interpretation of stagflation. I show this interpretation of stagflation led to a different research program, which has been overlooked by history of macroeconomics.