Minisymposium on the History of Econometrics: Introduction

Abstract

The decade 1987 to 1997 was a great one for the history of econometrics. It began with Roy Epstein’s 1987 monograph. Mary Morgan’s classic history was published not long after (in 1990). Other important works soon followed: in addition to journal articles, witness Duo Qin’s 1993 study of the emergence of modern econometric practice, David Hendry and Morgan’s Foundations of Econometric Analysis (1995), which compiled original source materials, and Judy Klein’s 1997 history of time-series analysis. While work continued in the meantime, it was perhaps inevitable that, after such a strong beginning, work on the history of econometrics would go off the boil. By the middle of the fi rst decade of the new millennium, some of us had come to believe that it was time to turn up the heat and bring the history of econometrics back to the forefront of the fi eld. An opportunity arose when the North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society was scheduled to be held at Duke University in June 2007. Roy Weintraub suggested that we organize a session, and we put out a call for papers. The papers in this minisymposium are the fruit of that effort. The session was a great success in two respects. First, the papers were top-notch and represented valuable directions in the history of econometrics. John Aldrich’s paper investigated the place of econometrics in the history of statistics; Marcel Boumans’s paper connected Trygve Haavelmo’s early work in econometrics with its methodological context and