Charles F. Roos, Harold T. Davis and the Quantitative Approach to Business Cycle Analysis at the Cowles Commission in the 1930s and early 1940s*

@article{Dimand2007CharlesFR,
  title={Charles F. Roos, Harold T. Davis and the Quantitative Approach to Business Cycle Analysis at the Cowles Commission in the 1930s and early 1940s*},
  author={Robert W. Dimand and William Veloce},
  journal={The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought},
  year={2007},
  volume={14},
  pages={519 - 542}
}
  • R. Dimand, W. Veloce
  • Published 1 September 2007
  • Economics
  • The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought
Abstract While much has been written about the history of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics after its move from Colorado Springs to Chicago in 1939, its earlier history under the first two Cowles Commission research directors, Charles F. Roos and Harold T. Davis, is little known. This paper examines their quantitative approach to business analysis, notably in Roos' 1934 Cowles monograph on Dynamic Economics and Davis's 1941 books on The Analysis of Economic Time Series and The… 
View on Taylor & Francis
11 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
1
Background Citations
3

11 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

Macroeconomic dynamics at the Cowles Commission from the 1930s to the 1950s
Abstract This paper explores the development of dynamic modelling of macroeconomic fluctuations at the Cowles Commission from Roos, Dynamic Economics (Cowles Monograph No. 1, 1934) and Davis,…
Changing Economics: Irving Fisher, the Cowles Commission, and the Econometric Society
Changing Economics: Fisher, the Cowles Commission, and the Econometric Society: From his simulation model of general equilibrium in the 1890s through his subsequent use of correlation analysis,…
The Cowles Commission and Foundation for Research in Economics
Founded in 1932 by a newspaper heir disillusioned by the failure of forecasters to predict the Great Crash, the Cowles Commission promoted the use of formal mathematical and statistical methods in…
The Cowles Commission and Foundation for Research in Economics
  • R. Dimand
  • Economics
    SSRN Electronic Journal
  • 2019
Founded in 1932 by a newspaper heir disillusioned by the failure of forecasters to predict the Great Crash, the Cowles Commission promoted the use of formal mathematical and statistical methods in…
Business and the Making of American Econometrics, 1910–1940
From 1910 – 1940, the practice of business and the practice of economics came to inform one another in novel ways, a reconfiguration that included the emergence of econometrics. The core locus for…
Alfred Cowles and Robert Rhea on the Predictability of Stock Prices
Brown, Goetzmann, and Kumar (1998) show that Cowles’s test of Hamilton’s version of the Dow Theory was flawed: Cowles compared rates of return without adjusting for risk. A similar argument against…
A Path Through the Wilderness: Time Discounting in Growth Models
Although economists have recognized long ago that “time enters into all economic questions”, the ways they treated and modeled time has varied substantially in the last century. While in the 1930s…
ECONOMIC DYNAMICS AND THE CALCULUS OF VARIATIONS IN THE INTERWAR PERIOD
  • M. Pomini
  • Economics
    Journal of the History of Economic Thought
  • 2018
Analogies with rational mechanics played a pivotal role in the search for formal models in economics. In the period between the two world wars, a small group of mathematical economists tried to…
Indifference Curves and a Hydraulic Model of General Equilibrium
Indifference Curves and a Hydraulic Model of General Equilibrium examines Fisher’s Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices (Yale PhD dissertation 1891, published 1892) which not…
Business Cycles, Pump-Priming and the Role of Public Expenditures
...
1
2
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 60 REFERENCES
The Cowles Commission's Contributions to Econometrics at Chicago, 1939-1955
Alfred Cowles was an investment counselor in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He told me in 1952 that after the stock market crash of 1929, he realized that he did not understand the workings of the…
The history of econometric ideas: Formal models in econometrics
The Business Cycle a Damped Oscillation: Its Relation to Stock Prices
Frequency distributions of the Clearings Index of Business of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were made for ten-year periods from 1875 to date. This index measures clearings and debits to…
William Stanley Jevons
was inserted in the Annual Report. The original paper appeared in the Journal of the Statistical Society for 1866; but it was not till the books on logic were completed that he set to in earnest to…
A Dynamical Theory of Economics
  • C. Roos
  • Economics
    Journal of Political Economy
  • 1927
For many years theoretical economists have recognized the need for a dynamical theory of economics. Even Augustin Cournot, as far back as i838, realized the need for such a treatment, for he wrote:…
Some A Posteriori Probabilities in Stock Market Action
IN 1933, one of the authors' published an analysis of the results secured by 45 representative financial agencies in forecasting the prices of common stocks. This study, embracing the period of 41…
A Mathematical Theory of Price and Production Fluctuations and Economic Crises
  • C. Roos
  • Economics
    Journal of Political Economy
  • 1930
i. Statement of the problem.-Various papers and treatises have appeared exhibiting curves and statistics indicating that prices periodically oscillate about a given price trend.' Other investigations…
Can Stock Market Forecasters Forecast
THIS paper presents results of analyses of the forecasting efforts of 45 professional agencies which have attempted, either to select specific common stocks which should prove superior in investment…
Solar and Economic Relationships: A Preliminary Report
Jevons' analysis, 2.— Other theories of cyclical relations: Moore, 4; Huntington, 5.— The solar cycle, 7.— Correlation between solar and economic cycles, 9.—Changes in solar cycles and economic…
A History of Econometrics
Introduction. The Discovery of `Higher Statistics' in Economic Research. The Emergence of Structural Estimation. The Historical Context of Structural Estimation. Promises and Problems of Structural…
...
1
2
3
4
5
...