Research

Work in progress

  1. Carret, Vincent. “Inflation Expectations During the Korean War” (JMP, pdf)
  2. Carret, Vincent. “The Moral Costs of Price Controls” (presented at Duke)
  3. Carret, Vincent and Keith Jakee. “The Quest for Stability” (presented at Markets and Society)
  4. Carret, Vincent and Colin O’Reilly. “The Inverse Knowledge Problem” (presented at SEA)
  5. Carret, Vincent. “The Economic Philosophy of the Middle of the Road: Gabriel Hauge and the Eisenhower Administration” (presented at HISRECO)
  6. Carret, Vincent. “Inflation, Price Controls and Black Markets during the Korean War” SSRN Working Paper: link



Peer-reviewed articles

  1. 2024. “Wassily Leontief’s Research Program: Science, Beliefs, Institutions.” 2024. History of Political Economy.
    Click for abstract. Link.
    Wassily Leontief met with decades of success for the development of input-output analysis, and yet he remained a staunch critic of the economics profession throughout his life. To understand his success, its limits, and the origins of his discontent, I separate the scientific activities of input-output from the system of belief built around it, and from the institutions set up to advance this research program. This leads to considering the interaction of Leontief’s research program with other research programs through these three poles: the scientific debate, the collision of belief systems about the world, and an institutional fight for funds and researchers. The end result is a picture of how Leontief managed to build a successful research program where the science led to beliefs about the world that were able to justify building institutions promoting input-output, in an environment of competition and cooperation.
  2. 2024. “A micro foundational episode of the early history of macroeconomics: a 1932 debate on Walrasian economics and multiple equilibria,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. (with Michaël Assous)
    Click for abstract. Link.
    This paper documents an early fork in the development of macroeconomics, by examining a debate between the Dutch economists Jan Tinbergen and Johan Koopmans. In a 1932 paper, Tinbergen argued that two firms could be stuck in a “bad” equilibrium in the absence of a coordinated action to incrase employment. Koopmans replied with a paper demonstrating that multiple equilibria in an exchange economy could not be ranked on the basis of their productive efficiency. This debate contributed to a larger turn away from dynamising the general equilibrium model, towards the new field of macrodynamics, with long-ranging consequences for the field.
  3. 2023. “Moving Dynamics Beyond Business Cycles: Jan Tinbergen’s First Macrodynamic Model (1934-1936),” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. (with Michaël Assous)
    Click for abstract. Link.
    As soon as 1932, Jan Tinbergen proposed an explanation of the Great Depression based on a specific treatment of unstable processes and multiple equilibria. After his involvement in the early meetings of the Econometric Society, he worked on different dynamic models accounting for this instability. In 1934, he built a macrodynamic model generating new types of economic movements that did not return to a stationary state. This led him in 1936 to consider the possibility of having two equilibria, with damped or self-sustained cycles around the high equilibrium and a collapse around the low equilibrium. Tinbergen saw these models, with reference to Irving Fisher’s 1933 paper, as a way to interpret the potential of a crisis to trigger the collapse of the economy. In the end, it turns out that Tinbergen managed to extend the perspective for the study of the business cycle mechanism to non cyclical behaviors which, strikingly, remains almost totally ignored in most histories of macroeconomics and econometrics.
  4. 2022. “Fluctuations and growth in Ragnar Frisch’s rocking horse model,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
    Click for abstract. Link.
    Ragnar Frisch's famous "rocking horse" model has been the object of much praise and even controversy since its publication in 1933. This paper offers a new simulation of the model to show that there exists cyclical trajectories in the propagation mechanism. By building an analytical solution taking the same form as Frisch's original solution, we can provide new insights into the ideas encapsulated in his model, in particular the fact that the author constructed a model combining cycles and growth. The exploration of Frisch's formal construction of the model leads us to link his statistical work on the decomposition of time series with his economic insights on investment cycles, which both led to the 1933 model. We contrast Frisch’s approach to that of other econometricians who used similar equations, showing that their different mathematical solutions were the product of what they wanted to show with their models.
  5. 2022. “Rupture and continuity in the original divide between micro-dynamics and macro-dynamics,” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought*.
    Click for abstract. Link.
    In 1933, Ragnar Frisch introduced a distinction between micro-dynamics and macro-dynamics in his paper on "Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics." His claim that he proposed the first macro-dynamic analysis and that micro-dynamic schemes were limited to the dynamics of specific markets or behaviors had a lasting impact on the field. But the introduction of this separation created a narrative hiding what had been done before and introduced a tension between the two approaches. By going back to the content of micro-dynamic analysis, we are led to two lines of research that were pursued during the 1920s and early 1930s: cobweb models and intertemporal optimization. A pivotal economist for going beyond micro-dynamics was Jan Tinbergen, who had contributed to both these approaches, and went beyond with new analytical tools. However, the idea of intertemporal optimization met with some opposition when it was scaled up to the whole economic system. This prompted Frisch to propose his new approach, which met with immediate success as more schemes were proposed. Tinbergen was himself one of the first converts to macro-dynamics, but the links between the two approaches and the new tensions created by their separation remained. This tension between the newly created categories can be viewed as a result of opposing views on causality, which were rooted in differing mathematical approaches, a point explicitly made by the next generation.
  6. 2022. “The importance of multiple equilibria for economic policy in Jan Tinbergen’s early works,” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. (with Michaël Assous)
    Click for abstract. Link.
    This article provides a comprehensive view of Tinbergen’s macrodynamic models developed during the 1930s and early 1940s, showing how the economist’s concerns evolved from problems of instability to the idea of reaching higher positions of equilibria. Tinbergen built these ideas in the framework of nonlinear models, which he used to shed a new light on several policy problems: wage changes, government expenditure and its relation to pump-priming, and the regulation of purchasing power. This work on multiple equilibria was complementary to the macroeconometric models developed in the late 1930s, where linearity was justified by the assumption of small shocks.
  7. 2021. “Expectations and full employment. Hansen, Samuelson and Lange,” Revue d’Économie Politique. (with Michaël Assous, Olivier Bruno, and Muriel Dal-Pont Legrand)
    Click for abstract. Link.
    From the outset, expectations were a central part of the first business cycles and early growth models. In the 1940s, a third line of research emerged which questioned the capacity of an economy to reach full-employment equilibrium. Starting with Alvin Hansen [1938] and culminating with Oskar Lange [1944], the crux of the debate evolved from the existence of full employment equilibrium to the analysis of its stability, suggesting an increased role of expectations and finally challenging the economic system’s global stability. The present paper traces those debates through the contributions of Hansen, Paul Samuelson and Lange. Using archive materials, we show that while Samuelson’s analysis of instability remained implicit, his correspondence reveals that he encouraged Lange to examine it more carefully. Lange’s results are presented in his 1944 Monograph published by the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. We point out that his contribution cannot be understood in isolation either from his exchanges with Samuelson or the way that Keynesian ideas were being interpreted in the United States. Finally, we emphasize the ambiguity of Samuelson’s view on instability and expectations.
  8. 2020. “(In)Stability at the Cowles Commission (1939–1948),” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. (with Michaël Assous)
    Click for abstract. Link.
    Stability analysis touched off extensive discussions at the Cowles Commission between 1939 and 1948. Oskar Lange, later followed by Lawrence Klein and Don Patinkin, among others, advocated for a move from a static analysis aimed at proving the existence of a stationary equilibrium with unemployment towards a dynamic approach exploring stability properties of full employment equilibria. In presence of excess supply of goods and labour with flexible money wages and prices, the message was that macroeconomic pathologies are better regarded as disequilibrium dynamics when full employment equilibrium is unstable – Lange and Klein – or when it is stable – Patinkin. The objective of this paper is to examine this type of modelling and how it provided the basis of a specific political vision shared by most economists of the Cowles Commission in the 1940’s.



Book

  1. 2022. Modeling Economic Instability - A History of Early Macroeconomics. Cham: Springer (with Michaël Assous).
    Click for abstract. Link to the author's website. Link to the editor's website.
    This book offers a fresh perspective on the early history of macroeconomics, by examining the macro-dynamic models developed from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, and their treatment of economic instability. It first explores the differences and similarities between the early mathematical business cycle models developed by Ragnar Frisch, Michal Kalecki, Jan Tinbergen and others, which were presented at meetings of the Econometric Society and discussed in private correspondence. By doing so, it demonstrates the diversity of models representing economic phenomena and especially economic crises and instability. Jan Tinbergen emerged as one of the most original and pivotal economists of this period, before becoming a leader of the macro-econometric movement, a role for which he is better known. His emphasis on economic policy was later mirrored in the United States in Paul Samuelson’s early work on business cycles analysis, which, drawing on Alvin Hansen, aimed at interpreting the 1937-1938 recession. The authors then show that the subsequent shift in Samuelson's approach, from the study of business cycle trajectories to the comparison of equilibrium points, provided a response to the econometricians' critique of early Keynesian models. In the early 1940s, Samuelson was able to link together the tools that had been developed by the econometricians and the economic content that was at the heart of the so-called Keynesian revolution. The problem then shifted from business cycle trajectories to the disequilibrium between economic aggregates, and the issues raised by the global stability of full employment equilibrium. This was addressed by Oskar Lange, who presented an analysis of market coordination failures, and Lawrence Klein, Samuelson's first PhD student, who pursued empirical work in this direction.



Book chapters

  1. 2024. “Debt Diplomacy in the 1920s: the Case of the French and Hellenic War Debts,” in Brandon Christensen (ed.), Reassessing Libertarian Foreign Policy: Interstate Federalism and the Anarchy of Westphalia. Palgrave, Macmillan.
    Click for abstract. Link.
    In the aftermath of World War I, a financial war was fought on the battlegrounds of international organizations and financial diplomacy. While the League of Nations’ Economic and Financial Organization tried to ensure the reconstruction of Europe through guaranteed loans and financial reforms, the Great Powers who dominated the League tried to maintain their spheres of influence. The case of the French-Hellenic war debts illustrates those issues: in the 1920s, the Greeks were barred from international capital markets after years of wars and financial mismanagement. A mission was sent to Greece by the League to evaluate the reforms needed before backing the emission of a loan, with several French emissaries among the envoys. The French government subsequently tried to take advantage of the ratification process of the loan, by threatening to block its emission if the Greeks did not repay their war debts. The debt-diplomacy of the French government is an example of a two-level game: pushed to the brink on the domestic side by their own financial troubles and resentment over the German reparations, France sought to obtain an international victory through the process of European reconstruction. On the international scene, they were stymied by the extension of Anglo-American financial interests. The political process of the League shows how much economic problems were subordinate to political considerations, and how domestic and international levels were entangled in the financial diplomacy of the postwar reconstruction.
  2. 2024. “Econometrics at Harvard,” Palgrave: Macmillan (with Michaël Assous).
    Click for abstract. Link.
    The place of Harvard in the development of econometrics is assessed through the research of its faculty and the development of the courses they taught. Over the course of the century, as the content of econometrics was itself transformed, we find that the Harvard department of economics occupied a singular place in the econometric landscape. This idiosyncrasy was defined by large projects such as the Harvard barometer of the 1920s or the postwar development of input-output analysis, but also by the lack of common purpose that often characterized the work of its members. Through the storied halls of the university passed many of the best and brightest, but few were given the chance to pursue their projects durably, to the detriment of the constitution of a "Harvard econometrics."



Reviews and comments

  1. Carret, Vincent. “Review of ‘Leonid Hurwicz: Intelligent Designer. How War and the Great Depression Inspired a Nobel Economist.’ by Michael Hurwicz” History of Political Economy. Forthcoming.
  2. Carret, Vincent. 2024 “Review of ‘Communist Planning versus Rationality: Mathematical Economics and the Central Plan in Eastern Europe and China.’ edited by János Kovács” History of Political Economy. 56 (1): 170-173.
  3. Carret, Vincent. 2023 “The Emperor has no Clothes: A Reply to Ginoux and Jovanovic.” Letter to the Editor, Journal of the History of Economic Thought. 45 (3): 511-519.
  4. Carret, Vincent. 2022 “Review of ‘Jan Tinbergen (1903-1994) and the Rise of Economic Expertise’ by Erwin Dekker” Journal of the History of Economic Thought. 44 (4): 673-676.
  5. Carret, Vincent. 2022 “A Comment on Ginoux and Jovanovic, ‘The Rocking Horse Model Does Rock.’” History of Economic Ideas. Anno XXX, 2022/2: 165-171.