... 15 ( September ): 78 -80. ____. 1927b . Need We Be Afraid of a Job Famine? Nation's Business 15 ( January ): 22 -24. New Data, New Issues: The Origins of the Technological Unemployment Debates Gregory R. Woirol New economic data sets are not created by accident. Because...

...Thomas A. Stapleford This article explores the recent history of the data revolution in economics, arguing that many of its features parallel the vision for statistical economics championed by Wesley Mitchell during the interwar period. Seeing the data revolution as kin to Mitchell’s hopes...

...Ariane Dupont-Kieffer; Alain Pirotte This essay focuses on the early years of panel data econometrics and two seminal papers by Yair Mundlak ( 1961 ) and Pietro Balestra and Marc Nerlove ( 1966 ). The issue of latent individual heterogeneity was identified as a central problem. One main ambition...

...Thomas A. Stapleford This essay examines the evolution of data-collection practices in American expenditure surveys over much of the twentieth century. Economists conducting expenditure surveys faced one fundamental concern: their success hinged on the cooperation of interviewees (typically...

... Press CCC 00 I 8-2702/85/$1.50 The functions of numerical data in the writings of Graunt , Petty, and Davenant A. M.Endres I. Introduction This is a study of the functions of numerical data...

...Daniel Kuehn Abstract In his 1962 NBER volume, The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union , Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and data limitations. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo...

...” over a twelve-year period. The article wonders how could the statistical fiction be validated by the IMF economists, and to what extent they took part in Mauritanian data production. The article argues that the auditorauditee relation places less importance on the veracity and the pertinence of numbers...

...Roger E. Backhouse; Béatrice Cherrier It is widely accepted that economics has changed significantly since the 1970s with the development of new data sources, new methods of analysis, and the computer. This paper argues that this transformation of the discipline involves more than just a rise...

... of future demand, price and cost fluctuations, or financial markets—based on the analysis of statistical data. Forecasting united a suite of specific interactions with the practice of economics: business support for the construction of specific economic data (making possible new forms of econometric...

...Marcel Boumans This essay discusses Francis Galton’s method of inductive inference where the data are photographs of human faces. His aim of induction was to determine the typical characteristics of the natural class to which the individuals belong by composing the relevant photographs...

...Amanar Akhabbar 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. Wassily Leontief’s inter-industry method offers a case study of a nonprobabilistic...

...Aiko Ikeo In Japan the systematic collection of economic data, including the prices of such commodities as rice, started for policy purposes in the sixteenth century. Yet such external impacts as the Tokyo meeting of the International Statistical Institute (1930) and the visit of two founding...

... business cycle and DSGE models and to the use of shocks as generators of impulse-response functions, which are in turn used as data in matching estimators. The history is organized around the observability of shocks. As well as documenting a critical conceptual development in economics, the history...

... in the quantifying of economic development and structural transformation: Simon Kuznets and Hollis Chenery. Kuznets brought the national income framework to bear on the process of growth and structural transformation in, primarily, more-developed countries, with data stretching back to the early phases...

...Marcel Boumans; Neil De Marchi Development economics in the 1950s and 1960s, as Jan Tinbergen and Irma Adelman saw it, was a “groping in the dark.” Besides the limited knowledge of dynamic mechanisms, the lack of data was a severe problem for any attempt at modeling, whether macroeconomic, input...

...Nicholas Crafts This paper examines the use of growth accounting by economic historians developed following Robert Solow's famous 1957 paper. Several general tendencies are identified, including a desire to account for Solow's residual and a reluctance to adopt the data-demanding methodological...

..., empirical data, bits of economic theory, institutional arrangements, the aims and hopes of economic planning, images and visions of the economy, and the practical requirements and affordances of computing technologies. The article traces the movements and changes of the multi-sector growth model...

... and analytical statistics. In his courses, willing to interconnect Vilfredo Pareto’s and Wesley Mitchell’s economics, Wilson emphasized that a sound scientific attitude required connecting economics with data, if only in idealized conditions. Finally, the paper argues that Wilson’s lasting influence in economics...

...Harro Maas At the end of the 1950s, resource economists developed a method to derive demand functions for recreation sites from travel cost data for recreation planning purposes. Based on this work, a second, direct method of measurement was developed in the early sixties that became known...