Clio and the Economist: Making Historians Count

Greasley, David; Oxley, Les

doi:10.1111/j.1467-6419.2010.00649.x

Cited by 14 publications

References 99 publications

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Clio and the Economist: Making Historians Count

Greasley¹,

Oxley²

2011

Economics and History

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Cliometrics has been with us for half a century. At least it was in 1960 that the word itself was coined by Stanley Reiter to describe a style of quantitative history that linked clio, the muse of history with measurement or more succinctly metrics. Three years earlier a joint session of the Economic History Association and the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Income and Wealth was held in Williamstown, Massachusetts and many practitioners date the birth of cliometrics to those meetings. The task issue of the Journal of Economic History in 1957 was headed the integration of economic theory and economic history and contained some of the fruits of the pioneers' discussions and a summary of the proceeding by Simon Kuznets.Regular workshops of cliometricians date from 1960 and the discipline laid strong foundations over the following decade, most especially in the USA. Fogel (1964) published Railroads and Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, which stimulated intensive methodological debate among historians worldwide. Very quickly the British Economic History Society commissioned a paper by Fogel 'The new economic history: its findings and methods' which was published in the Economic History Review in 1966. The 'new economic history' and 'econometric history' were at that time alternate labels for cliometrics.The explicit connecting of economics with economic history was the hallmark of cliometrics as it developed in the USA. Reiter himself was a mathematical economist whose work included collaboration with economic historian Hughes to produce a paper, 'The First 1945 British Steamships' (Hughes andReiter, 1958) published by the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1958. That paper, along with a celebrated paper of two economists, Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, 'The economics of slavery in the Antebellum South', which also appeared in 1958 in the Journal of Political Economy are often associated with the birth of cliometrics (Conrad and Mayer, 1958). In a wider context the growth of cliometrics drew on the longer established traditions of quantitative economic history, and on concurrent developments in the social sciences and computing during the 1960s.

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Clio and the Economist: Making Historians Count

Greasley¹,

Oxley²

2011

Economics and History

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Cliometrics and Time Series Econometrics: Some Theory and Applications

Greasley

Oxley²

2011

Economics and History

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Abstract:The paper discusses a range of modern time series methods that have become popular in the past 20 years and considers their usefulness for cliometrics research both in theory and via a range of applications. Issues such as, spurious regression, unit roots, cointegration, persistence, causality, structural time series methods, including time varying parameter models, are introduced as are the estimation and testing implications that they involve. Applications include a discussion of the timing and potential causes of the British Industrial Revolution, income "convergence" and the long run behaviour of English Real Wages 1264 -1913. Finally some new and potentially useful developments are discussed including the mildly explosive processes; graphical modelling and long memory.

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