Oxford’s Contributions to Econometrics

Abstract

Faculty and graduates of Oxford University have played a significant role in the history of econometrics from an early date. The term econometrics was only formulated by Ragnar Frisch in the 1930s, but in the 17 th Century, William Petty created a discipline that he called Political Arithmetick, a forerunner of quantitative economics that led to the more specialized statistical approach of econometrics. During the first half of the 20 th Century, Oxford scholars like Colin Clark made major advances in creating aggregate economic measurements. From the late 1970s, the focus was primarily on macro-econometrics for the remainder of that century, buttressed by research on methods for analyzing dynamic panels. In the 21 st century, micro-econometrics was added to the portfolio. The most recent addition is Climate Econometrics, developing and applying econometric tools for analyzing climate data, which is driven by human economic behavior so faces much the same slew of problems as macroeconomic time series.