Search

Les quatre articles de ce volume viennent conclure un double numero special de la Revue d’Economie Politique (REP), dedie au role joue par les seminaires, les conferences et les workshops au sein de l’histoire de la pensee economique. En introduction au premier volume (Cherrier et Saidi [2021]), nous plaidions pour que ces evenements scientifiques qui, a de rares exceptions, servent d’arriere-plan aux photographies proposees par les historiens – qu’elles mettent en scene les travaux d’un auteur, la dynamique d’une communaute intellectuelle, ou encore l’emergence d’un sous-champ disciplinaire –, fassent leur retour au premier plan. Nous les exhortions a allonger la focale afin d’operer le necessaire recadrage qui fera, de ce qui etait autrefois l’un des elements constitutifs du fond, un element contributif de fond, soit l’un des principaux protagonistes de l’œuvre finale. Ces rencontres scientifiques sont le plus souvent presentees comme des chantiers de construction, des fabriques, au sein desquels les idees sont echangees et confrontees, debouchant sur l’elaboration de concepts, de theories, mais egalement d’outils, de pratiques, de standards, voire de programmes politiques. Pour autant, ces manifestations contribuent rarement a produire du consensus a partir de positions divergentes, prealablement articulees. Elles cherchent, avant tout, a planter un decor, une atmosphere, mettant en scene les accords et desaccords des participants, structurant le champ disciplinaire en un maillage de reseaux, de communautes, et meme de hierarchies, que les economistes aiment a representer sous la forme d’une partition d’approches concurrentes. Au sein de ces reseaux, positionnements et dynamiques se materialisent au travers de details anodins (le menu du diner de gala, le plan de table, l’ordre des prises de parole, la frequentation des sessions, etc.), que les historiens tendent a ignorer pour se focaliser sur l’essentiel. Pourtant, ces details trahissent les structures profondes qui regissent a la fois notre discipline et ses acteurs. Leur etude approfondie, nous le pensons, doit permettre de donner du sens a ces signifiants « insignifiants ». Ces rencontres sont aussi utilisees comme des « armes de diffusion massive », destinees a propager des visions epistemiques differentes, dont chacune pretend definir les contours de ce qu’est une « bonne » science et de sa place dans la societe. Il s’agit, pour leurs defenseurs comme pour leurs detracteurs, de convaincre ou de discrediter, de legitimer ou de contester, d’imposer ou de remettre en cause, etc. Aussi, les seminaires, conferences et workshops permettent-ils de mieux comprendre les rapports de force, en presence comme au sein du champ de l’economie, et d’expliquer les antagonismes (sociaux, intellectuels, culturels, educatifs, de genre, etc.) qui favorisent ou entravent la dissemination des idees, leur emergence reussie ou leur lente disparition, l’exclusion ou la marginalisation d’une litterature. Ils rendent visibles, alimentent, perpetuent ces antagonismes, et refletent la maniere dont le champ a evolue et s’est institutionnalise au cours du temps. De maniere indissociable, ils federent (les membres d’une meme communaute) autant qu’ils divisent (les communautes entre elles), agregent (les idees) autant qu’ils (les) eparpillent, participent activement a la formation, la deformation, et la transformation des reseaux. En scrutant quelques-uns des seminaires, workshops ou conferences qui se sont tenus ces dernieres decennies, le second volume de ce numero special se propose de dresser le portrait de quatre figures tutelaires qui ont marque de leur emprunte l’histoire de la pensee : James Buchanan, Friedrich Hayek, Alfred Cowles et Diego Gambetta. Le volume s’ouvre sur deux anciens presidents de la societe du Mont Pelerin, Buchanan et Hayek. Ils sont croques, respectivement, par Boettke et al. [2021] et Innset [2021], au travers de leur implication dans l’animation des evenements scientifiques de la Virginia Political Economy (VPE) pour le premier, et dans l’organisation de la conference fondatrice du Mont Pelerin pour le second. Ces deux contributions montrent, l’une comme l’autre, bien qu’avec des regards tres divergents, les forces a la fois centrifuges et centripetes exercees par ce type de rencontres. Innset souligne combien l’homogeneite ideologique d’une communaute de pensee a pu etre affectee par une part (meme marginale) d’heterogeneite sociale. Il donne egalement a voir des dynamiques de genre, caracteristiques du milieu du XXe siecle. De leur cote, si Boettke, Marciano et Stein ont la volonte de mettre en avant la capacite de Buchanan a uniformiser et federer autour de lui les membres de la VPE, ils n’en laissent pas moins entrevoir, en filigrane, les possibles effets exclusifs (ou sectaires) que ce leadership a pu imposer a celles et ceux qui n’en acceptaient pas les termes. Outre la question du leadership, nous avions conclu dans l’introduction a ce double volume que l’esprit d’entreprise revetait, sans nul doute, une importance capitale dans la capacite de ce type d’evenements a cimenter une communaute. Les Cowles Summer Research Conferences, scrutees par Dimand [2021], en offrent un bon exemple. Ces rencontres, organisees sous le haut patronage d’Alfred Cowles, visent a promouvoir l’economie theorique et mathematique. Cowles, qui n’etait pas lui-meme un economiste (bien que souhaitant se faire un nom au sein de la discipline) sinon un veritable homme d’affaires, pese moins sur le programme des conferences que sur leur organisation pratique. Le leadership intellectuel est laisse a ceux qui, a l’image de Irving Fisher, Trygve Haavelmo ou Paul Samuelson, presentent, plusieurs jours durant, theories nouvelles et outils quantitatifs. L’exemple de Cowles montre que la soutien financier est au moins aussi importante que la creativite intellectuelle dans le succes de ce type de manifestations. Certaines figures parviennent cependant a cumuler des qualites de leader et d’entrepreneur. C’est, en substance, le point de vue defendu par Camilotto [2021], qui souligne la capacite de Gambetta, jeune sociologue de Cambridge, a rassembler et unir, autour du concept de « confiance », economistes, sociologues et philosophes, dans le cadre d’un seminaire interdisciplinaire en 1985-1986. Camilotto montre les echanges qui peuvent s’operer au sein d’un tel creuset, de meme que les productions qui en resultent : un interet affirme des economistes pour un objet initialement confine a la sociologie, une adhesion des sociologues aux outils proposes par la theorie des jeux et l’economie experimentale. Prises conjointement, les contributions de ces deux numeros donnent a voir la diversite des productions faconnees tout au long de ces seminaires, conferences et workshops, et la multiplicite des roles qu’ils tiennent – explicitement ou implicitement – dans l’histoire de la discipline economique. Elles constituent, nous l’esperons, un plaidoyer qui convaincra nos collegues historien.ne.s de la necessite de prendre en compte, plus systematiquement, ces aspects, souvent consideres comme anecdotiques, de l’histoire des sciences, ainsi que nos collegues economistes de reflechir aux dynamiques, parfois cachees, que nourrissent les seminaires, conferences et workshops qu’ils.elles organisent et auxquels ils.elles participent au quotidien.

In a 1957 paper, Robert Solow exploited the mathematical properties of the aggregate production function to isolate the role of disembodied “technical change” in economic growth. Solow’s method allowed to disentangle the role of technical change from that of production factors, with the residual serving as a measure of total factor productivity growth. His method and results were equally met with praise and criticism, some focused on the use of an aggregate production function, the residual composition and measurement errors. The interrogations around the residual gave rise to an abundant literature from the late 1950s which made it possible to improve the technique of calculation and refine the results. In this paper, I argue that in the 1980s, debates around the Solow residual were not essentially different from those which took place in the 1950s and 1960s (measurement issues, increasing returns to scale or procyclical productivity). They both have blossomed within the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), they both highlight and are central to the macroeconomics controversies of the decade and its resolution in a 1990s consensus. Though, these debates have been accompanied by a change in the “epistemic status of shocks” (Duarte and Hoover 2009, 228) in economics, which redesigned the Solow residual from a source of secular growth to be quantified to the initial impulse of short-term economic fluctuations. I allege that it was the ability to decompose the residual theoretically and empirically that made it a weapon in the war between those believed the business cycle was driven by supply-side factors (Freshwater) vs demand-side factors (Saltwater).

International audience

This paper document the disciplinary exchanges between economists and engineers at Stanford throughout the 20th century. We also elucidate how this cross-fertlization was mediated by the institutional structure of the university. We outline the role of key scholars such as Kenneth Arrow and Robert Wilson, as well as engineers turned administrators like Frederick Terman. We show that engineers largely drew upon successive economic theories of decision and allocation with a view to improving practical industrial management decisions. Reciprocally, economists found in engineering the tools (from linear programming to optimal control theory) they needed to rethink production and growth theory, an epistemology of “application” that emphasized awareness to institutional details, trials and errors and experiments to improve the design of processes and machines, and all sorts of industrial settings to operationalize their theories of decision, strategic interaction and bargaining. By the 2000s, they had turned into economic engineers designing markets and other allocation mechanisms. These cross-disciplinary exchanges were mediated by Stanford’s own institutional culture, notably its use of joint appointments, the development of multidisciplinary “programs” for students, the ability to attract a variety of visitors every year, the entrepreneurial and contract-oriented vision of its administrators, and the close ties with the industrial milieu that came to be called the Silicon Valley.

This paper documents the disciplinary exchanges between economists and engineers at Stanford throughout the 20th century. We elucidate how this cross-fertilization was mediated by the institutional structure of the university. We outline the role of key scholars such as Kenneth Arrow and Robert Wilson, as well as engineers turned administrators like Frederick Terman. We show that engineers largely drew upon successive economic theories of decision and allocation with a view to improving practical industrial management decisions. Reciprocally, economists found in engineering the tools they needed to rethink production and growth theory (from linear programming to optimal control theory, an epistemology of “application” that emphasized awareness to institutional details, trials and errors and experiments to improve the design of processes and machines, and all sorts of industrial settings to operationalize their theories of decision, strategic interaction and bargaining. By the 2000s, they had turned into economic engineers designing markets and other allocation mechanisms. These cross-disciplinary exchanges were mediated by Stanford’s own institutional culture, notably its use of joint appointments, the development of multidisciplinary “programs” for students, the ability to attract a variety of visitors every year, the entrepreneurial and contract-oriented vision of its administrators, and the close ties with the industrial milieu that came to be called the Silicon Valley.

This short paper offers some reflections on the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize awarded to Paul Romer. We describe the intellectual path that led him to embed endogenously-generated knowledge in growth models, a contribution that we believe was foremost a mathematical achievement. Accordingly, we examine Romer’s subsequent methodological statements on how mathematical is used and abused in theorizing. We locate his disagreement with other economists, in particular Robert Lucas, in their respective beliefs about the right degree of correspondence between real world objects, economic concepts and their mathematical representation. Romer endorses a much debated millennium-old vision of knowledge whereby the scientist needs to “carve the system at its joint” like a skilled “butcher.” Lucas rather conceives himself as a “story-teller” who build “artificial mechanisms” to highlight real-world phenomena.

In this paper, we use archival sources, interviews and bibliometrics to trace the development of a loose community interested in indeterminacy and sunspots, and we propose several explanations for this indeterminate fate of their models. Sunspots were initially developed by Cass and Shell in reaction to some perceived inconsistencies they found in Lucas’s 1972 model. The idea that extrinsic beliefs matter in the context of indeterminacy was then spread by a set of researchers associated with the Center for Analytical Research in Economics and the Social Sciences (CARESS), at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Centre pour la Recherche Economique et ses Applications (CEPREMAP) in France, though by adopting distinct modeling strategies and vocabulary. By the mid-1980s, several theorists understood that they were interested in common topics – fluctuations, indeterminacy and coordination failures and attempted to draw connections between OLGs, general equilibrium, non-linear dynamics and game theory models. We explain how this convergence was counterbalanced by several fragmenting forces, and we outline several explanations for the marginalization of these models within economics: they were perceived by macroeconomists to be ultra-sophisticated limit cases devoid of practical relevance, they had no empirical dimension, and they were neglected by policy-makers, in particular central bankers. Finally, we quickly describe efforts by the second generation of sunspot theorists to correct these flaws by switching to RBC modeling and calibration, and provide a few hints on the current state of sunspot models.

It has been established under perfect competition and constant returns-to-scale that a one-sector growth model may exhibit multiple stationary equilibria and local indeterminacy when income tax rates are endogenously determined by a balanced-budget rule while government expenditures are fixed. The present paper shows that determinacy of the equilibrium trajectory is, however, generically preserved for a non-empty range of initial values of the capital stock.

It has been argued that a balanced-budget rule exhibiting sufficient fiscal increasing returns creates aggregate instability by generating expectation-driven fluctuations. This paper shows that the assertion crucially depends on the nature of the external effects affecting the technology. By contrast with factor-specific externalities usually studied in the relevant literature, the balanced-budget rule can be used as a stabilization policy to rule out indeterminacy based on sector-specific externalities, provided the discount rate is small enough. The policy is more efficient when government spending is financed by a tax on labor income: stabilization cannot be achieved under an exclusive capital levy. However, capital levy may help in reducing the taxation on labor supply while main- taining stabilization but generates an increase in the tax burden. Consequences for policy prescriptions are discussed.

In this paper, we use archival sources, interviews and bibliometrics to trace the development of a loose community interested in indeterminacy and sunspots, and we propose several explanations for this indeterminate fate of their models. Sunspots were initially developed by Cass and Shell in reaction to some perceived inconsistencies they found in Lucas’s 1972 model. The idea that extrinsic beliefs matter in the context of indeterminacy was then spread by a set of researchers associated with the Center for Analytical Research in Economics and the Social Sciences (CARESS), at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Centre pour la Recherche Economique et ses Applications (CEPREMAP) in France, though by adopting distinct modeling strategies and vocabulary. By the mid-1980s, several theorists understood that they were interested in common topics – fluctuations, indeterminacy and coordination failures and attempted to draw connections between OLGs, general equilibrium, non-linear dynamics and game theory models. We explain how this convergence was counterbalanced by several fragmenting forces, and we outline several explanations for the marginalization of these models within economics: they were perceived by macroeconomists to be ultra-sophisticated limit cases devoid of practical relevance, they had no empirical dimension, and they were neglected by policy-makers, in particular central bankers. Finally, we quickly describe efforts by the second generation of sunspot theorists to correct these flaws by switching to RBC modeling and calibration, and provide a few hints on the current state of sunspot models.

In this article, the authors investigate competitive firm behaviors in a two-firm environment assuming linear cost and demand functions. By introducing conjectural variations, they capture the different market structures as specific configurations of a more general model. Conjectural variations are based on the assumption that each firm believes its own strategy influences its rival's strategy. Firms derive their optimal choice from these exogenous conjectures, under the form of a conjectural best-response function. The authors’ approach fully encompasses the standard measures of market power (the Lerner Index) and concentration (the Herfindahl Index), both depending on the conjectural variations. They finally represent, analytically and graphically, the equilibrium strategies and the associated indexes in a unified framework for any level of competition, ranging from perfect competition to collusion.

In this paper, we consider a hierarchical oligopoly model, in which firms compete on quantities of an homogeneous product. We provide a proof and an interpretation that under the three necessary and sufficient conditions of linear aggregate demand, constant and identical marginal costs, the strategy of leaders at any stage depends neither on the number of leaders who play after nor on the number of remaining stages. So, all firms behave as Cournotian oligopolists on the residual demand. We show that these three assumptions are not only sufficient but also necessary. Any departure from any of these assumptions rules out this property.

In this paper, we consider a T-stage linear model of Stackelberg oligopoly. First, we show geometrically and analytically that under the two conditions of linear market demand and identical constant marginal costs, the T-stage Stackelberg model reduces to a model where T oligopolies exploit residual demand sequentially. At any stage, leaders behave as if followers did not matter. Second, we study social welfare and convergence toward competitive equilibrium. Especially, we consider the velocity of convergence as the number of firms increases. The convergence is faster when reallocating firms from the most to the less populated cohort until equalizing the size of all cohorts., En este artículo se considera un modelo de oligopolio de Stackelberg lineal en T etapas. En primer lugar, se muestra geométrica y analíticamente que bajo las condiciones de demanda de mercado lineal y costos marginales constantes e idénticos el modelo de Stackelberg en T etapas se reduce a un modelo en el que T firmas explotan la demanda residual secuencialmente. En cualquier etapa, los líderes se comportan como si los seguidores no importaran. En segundo lugar, se estudia el bienestar social y la convergencia hacia el equilibrio competitivo. En particular, se considera la velocidad de convergencia a medida que el número de firmas incrementa. La convergencia es más rápida cuando las firmas se relocalizan desde la cohorte más poblada a la menos poblada hasta que el tamaño de las cohortes se iguala., Dans cet article nous considérons un modèle linéaire d'oligopole de Stackelberg avec T cohortes où les entreprises ont des stratégies en quantité. Tout d'abord, nous montrons géométriquement et analytiquement que, si la demande de marché est linéaire et les coûts marginaux sont constants et identiques, le modèle de Stackelberg à T étapes se réduit à un modèle où T oligopoles exploitent la demande résiduelle de manière séquentielle. À n'importe quelle étape, la stratégie des entreprises ne dépend ni du nombre d'entreprises qui jouent après, ni du nombre de cohortes restantes. Les entreprises leaders se comportent "comme si" les entreprises suiveuses n'avaient pas d'importance. Deuxièmement, nous étudions la convergence vers l'équilibre concurrentielle et le bien-être social. Nous considérons notamment la vitesse de convergence lorsque le nombre d'entreprises augmente.

We consider a real business cycle model with a productive externality and an aggregate non- convex technology set µa la Benhabib and Farmer embodying capacity utilization, which exhibits indeterminacy of the steady state and multiplicity of deterministic equilibria under plausible values of the increasing returns to scale. The aim of the paper is to rank these different equilibria according to the initial value of consumption using both a linear-quadratic approximation, extensively explained by Benigno and Woodford [2006a, 2006b], and simulation methods. We study the implications of such a ranking in terms of smoothness of the welfare-maximizing trajectory and show that the welfare- maximizing consumption and labor paths are all the smoother since the level of increasing returns is low. At last, we show that this solution provides a good benchmark for judging the desirability of the stabilization policy proposed by Guo and Lansing [1997].