Academic literature on the topic 'Tjalling Koopmans'

This paper surveys the contributions of David Cass, Tjalling Koopmans, and Edmond Malinvaud over the decades during which modern optimal growth theory was developed. By utilizing material ranging from dissertations, drafts, and working papers through conference presentations, discussions, and published papers, we show that both Malinvaud and Cass had significant impacts on the evolution of Koopman's thought, and the development of his part of what is known as “the Cass–Koopmans model.” Based on our findings, we conclude that the modern optimal growth model should include the contributions of Malinvaud, and be retitled “the Cass–Malinvaud–Koopmans” model accordingly.

Econometric Theory is proud to announce the winning article for the Tjalling C. Koopmans Econometric Theory Prize over the period 1994–1996 (inclusive). The prize is jointly supported by the publishers, Cambridge University Press, and Mrs. Truus Koopmans. It is named in honor of Tjalling C. Koopmans, the 1975 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science. The selection of the winning article was made by the Advisory Board of the Journal, and all articles published in Econometric Theory (1994–1996) were candidates for the prize, except those that were authored or coauthored by the Editor and members of the Advisory Board. The prize is accompanied by a financial award of $500 to each of the winning authors.

The present-day standard textbook narrative on the history of growth theory usually takes Robert Solow’s 1956 contribution as a key starting point, which was extended by David Cass and Tjalling Koopmans in 1965 by introducing an intertemporal maximization problem that defines the saving ratio in the economy. However, the road connecting Solow to the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model is not so straightforward. We argue that in order to understand Koopmans’s contribution, we have to go to the activity analysis literature that started before Solow 1956 and never had him as a central reference. We stress the role played by Edmond Malinvaud, with whom Koopmans interacted closely, and take his travel from the French milieu of mathematical economics to the Cowles Commission in 1950-51 and back to France as a guiding line. The rise of turnpike theory in the end of the 1950s generated a debate on the choice criteria of growth programs, opposing the productive efficiency typical of these models to the utilitarian approach supported by Malinvaud and Koopmans. The Vatican Conference of 1963, where Koopmans presented a first version of his 1965 model, was embedded in this debate. We argue that Malinvaud’s (and Koopmans’s) contributions were crucial to steer the activity analysis literature toward a utilitarian analysis of growth paths.

This paper is the text of the 1994 Tjalling Koopmans Lecture of the Cowles Foundation. The aim of this lecture was to survey the roles of misspecified models in econometrics. Through 10 stories we show how the misspecifipation problems can be dealt with and how misspecified models can play a positive role in inference processes.

Tjalling C. Koopmans, research director of the Cowles Foundation of Research in Economics, was the first US economist after World War II who, in the summer of 1965, travelled to the Soviet Union for an official visit to the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Koopmans left hoping to learn from the Soviet economists’ experience with applying linear programming to economic planning. Would his own theories, as discovered independently by Leonid V. Kantorovich, help increase allocative efficiency in a socialist economy? Inspired by a vague notion of universal reason spanning the iron curtain, Koopmans may have even envisioned a research community that transcends the political divide. Yet, he came home having discovered that learning about Soviet mathematical economists might be more interesting than learning from them. On top of that, he found the Soviet scene caught in the same deplorable situation he knew all too well from home: that mathematicians are the better economists. Reconstructing Koopmans’s voyage from a first-person perspective puts the spirit of universal economic knowledge at Cowles to test: Is it capable of establishing a dialogue across the political divide of the Cold War or is it limited to the Western academic cocoon?

The Representative Agent is nowadays a ubiquitous methodological tool used in modern economics. However its history is not fully developed. This thesis contributes to fill that gap by analyzing three separate, yet overlapping, contexts. The first chapter examines the rise of the representative consumer from the 1950s to the 1970s in the contributions to intertemporal economics by Tjalling Koopmans. In the first decade, the 1950s, Koopmans was an important figure in the Cowles Commission\'s incursion into decision theory, and, as an econometrician, an active participant in the debate on aggregation problems in economics. In the 1960s, Koopmans wrote the bulk of his contributions to the subfield of infinite horizon economies (including his optimal growth model) and it is in this decade that he fully articulated his views on the representative agent. Finally, in the 1970s, Koopmans continued contributing to the preference-based approach to individual decision-making leading to his intertemporally separable utility functions. Over these three decades, Koopmans went from an ambiguous stance toward the representative consumer to a more supportive one. Interestingly, his 1965 growth paper, that helped spread the use of the representative agent in macroeconomics, can be seen as a turning point. Part of this change is due to the ever-increasing use of the device in macroeconomics, a movement that he did not initiate but helped intensify. The second chapter asks whether the representative agent might have emerged as the outcome of transformations that occurred in microeconomics from the 1930s throughout the 1940s, especially in the subfield of demand theory. To tell this story, I begin with a particular historical interpretation of this subfield, propounded by Wade Hands and Philip Mirowski in the 1990s, centered on the theoretical formulations and the ensuing econometric testing of the system of demand functions that involved the mathematician Harold Hotelling and the economist Henry Schultz, known as the Hotelling-Schultz impasse. Although this impasse was abandoned by the end of the 1930s, this debate continued in the profession, including at the Cowles Commission, then directed by Koopmans. He played an important role in the emergence of the representative agent in the microeconomics of aggregation problems. The significance of Paul Samuelson\'s introduction of homothetic preferences into general equilibrium theory and its connection to Koopmans\'s writings during the 1950s is also scrutinized. The third chapter identifies the emergence of the representative agent in the development of the optimal growth literature. Although Paul Samuelson used infinitely-lived representative consumers to shed light on macroeconomic topics in his works from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, this tool only gained more adepts after it was \"agreed upon\" at the beginning of the 1960s. It is shown that the main center of research in growth economics at the time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), by congregating faculty members and graduate students working with the golden rule of growth as well as the turnpike theory, helped sanction the representative agent as a legitimate tool for macroeconomic investigations. Furthermore, in communities beyond MIT, economists such as Koopmans and Lionel McKenzie could have also played a role in spreading the methodological device, given the possible sway Samuelson had on them.
O Agente representativo é atualmente uma ferramenta metodológica onipresente em economia. No entanto sua história ainda não está totalmente desenvolvida. Essa tese contribui com esse estudo histórico através da análise de três contextos separados, mas, sobrepostos. O primeiro capítulo examina a ascensão do consumidor representativo nas décadas de 1950 a 1970 nas contribuições à economia intertemporal de Tjalling Koopmans. Na primeira década, de 1950, Koopmans foi um nome importante na incursão da Comissão Cowles na teoria da decisão e, como econometrista, também participou ativamente do debate sobre problemas de agregação na economia. Na década de 1960, Koopmans escreveu a maior parte de suas contribuições para o subcampo da economia do horizonte infinito (incluindo seu modelo de crescimento ótimo) e é nessa década que ele articulou de forma completa suas visões sobre o agente representativo. Finalmente, na década de 1970, Koopmans continuou contribuindo para a teoria das decisões individuais baseada nas preferências, levando-o à elaboração das funções de utilidade intertemporalmente separáveis. Ao longo dessas três décadas, Koopmans passou de um posicionamento ambíguo em relação ao consumidor representativo para outro mais inclusivo. Curiosamente, seu artigo de crescimento de 1965, que ajudou a disseminar o agente representativo em macroeconomia, pode ser visto como um ponto de virada no entendimento de Koopmans. Parte dessa mudança se deve ao uso cada vez maior do dispositivo na macroeconomia, um movimento que ele não iniciou mas ajudou a intensificar. O segundo capítulo pergunta se o agente representativo pode ter emergido como o resultado de transformações que ocorreram na microeconomia ao longo das décadas de 1930 e 1940, especialmente no subcampo da teoria da demanda. Para contar essa história, começo com uma interpretação histórica particular desse subcampo, proposta por Wade Hands e Philip Mirowski na década de 1990, centrada nas formulações teóricas e nos testes econométricos subsequentes do sistema de funções de demanda que envolviam o matemático Harold Hotelling e o economista Henry Schultz, conhecido como o impasse de Hotelling-Schultz. Embora esse impasse tenha sido abandonado ao final da década de 1930 por Schultz e Hotelling, o mesmo continuou na profissão, inclusive na Comissão Cowles, então dirigida por Koopmans. Ele desempenhou um papel importante no surgimento do agente representativo na microeconomia derivado dos problemas de agregação. O significado da introdução de preferências homotéticas de Paul Samuelson na teoria do Equilíbrio Geral e sua conexão com os escritos de Koopmans durante a década de 1950 também é examinado. O terceiro capítulo identifica o surgimento do agente representativo no desenvolvimento da literatura de crescimento ótimo. Embora Paul Samuelson tenha usado consumidores representativos de vida infinita para lançar luz sobre tópicos macroeconômicos em seus trabalhos de meados da década de 1930 até o início da década de 1950, essa ferramenta só ganhou mais adeptos depois de ter sido \"acordada\" no início dos anos 60. É mostrado que o principal centro de pesquisa em economia de crescimento na época, o Instituto de Tecnologia de Massachusetts (MIT), reunindo membros do corpo docente e estudantes de pós-graduação que trabalhavam com a regra de ouro do crescimento, bem como a Teoria da Turnpike, ajudou a sancionar o agente representativo como ferramenta legítima para investigações macroeconômicas. Além disso, em comunidades além do MIT, economistas como Koopmans e Lionel McKenzie também poderiam ter desempenhado um papel na divulgação do dispositivo metodológico dado uma possível influência que Samuelson teve sobre eles.