The Indeterminate Fate of Sunspots in Economics

Beatrice Cherrier and Aurélien Saïdi

History of Political Economy, 2018, vol. 50, issue 3, 425-481

Abstract: The standard view of the history of macroeconomics is one of a series of battles between schools of thought, eventually resolved through a “new neoclassical synthesis†achieved during the 1990s. Recently, however, historians have challenged the very notion that macroeconomists' models and practices can adequately be understood as a series of battles between schools of thought. Our purpose, in this article, is to tell the story of another set of researchers, “sunspot†theorists. Drawing on archives, interviews and bibliometric evidence, we explain why this loose community came to use several modeling strategies, including overlapping generation models, the Arrow-Debreu framework with restricted participation, game theory, and chaotic dynamics. They also developed overlapping yet distinct vocabularies, including terms such as sunspots, animal spirits, and self-fulfilling prophecies. We use the Alceste software to perform an unsupervised classification of text units according to the pattern of co-occurrences of word tokens within these units. The classification method provides evidence of the early fragmentation of the sunspot literature. To identify alternative meanings of a given lexical world the Alceste method analyzes interpretable segments of text, called “context units.â€

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-7023434 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:50:y:2018:i:3:p:425-481

Access Statistics for this article

History of Political Economy is currently edited by Kevin D. Hoover

More articles in History of Political Economy from Duke University Press Duke University Press 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster ().