Introduction à la diversité des méthodes dites quantitatives, aux débats en histoire de la pensée et épistémologie économique sur l’usage de ces méthodes, ainsi qu’aux récents travaux produits avec ces méthodes.
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.
When the temptation is growing in you to try your hand at quantitative methods, the first question is likely to be "but how can I do, and which tools should I learn to use?" I give here some arguments to engage yourself in learning R and then present different tutorials and R packages useful for historians of economics.
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 biblionetwork package provides functions to create fastly bibliometric networks like bibliographic coupling network, co-citation network and co-authorship network.
The networkflow package proposes functions to make it easier and quicker to work on networks. It mainly targets working on bibliometric networks. This package heavily relies on [igraph](https://igraph.org/r/) and [tidygraph](https://tidygraph.data-imaginist.com/index.html), and aims at producing ready-made networks for projecting them using [ggraph](https://ggraph.data-imaginist.com/).
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.