EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A Journey into Harold Hotelling’s Economics

Marion Gaspard (), Antoine Missemer and Thomas Mueller
Additional contact information
Marion Gaspard: TRIANGLE - Triangle : action, discours, pensée politique et économique - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - IEP Lyon - Sciences Po Lyon - Institut d'études politiques de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UJM - Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Harold Hotelling (1895-1973) was a major contributor to twentieth-century American economics. The overall thrust of his research, and his view of the role of mathematics in the discipline, have so far received little attention. Based on an unprecedented examination of his work and professional archives, this article provides a thorough analysis of Hotelling's background and contribution to economics. A self-taught economist in the 1920s, Hotelling built a research program that, despite apparently being highly technical, was primarily conceived as applied science to solve concrete social and economic issues, from spatial competition to natural resource exhaustion and public utility regulation. Although Hotelling's research was not exempt from criticism, it remains profoundly inspiring for the twenty-first century, from both a theoretical and epistemological point of view. When we remember that he trained the greatest, from Kenneth J. Arrow to William Vickrey, his career and ideas are all the more worthy of consideration.

Keywords: Hotelling; History of economic thought; natural resource economics; spatial competition; welfare economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://enpc.hal.science/hal-04840070v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Economic Literature, 2024, 62 (3), pp.1186-1212. ⟨10.1257/jel.20231700⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://enpc.hal.science/hal-04840070v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Journey into Harold Hotelling's Economics (2024) Downloads
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:hal:journl:hal-04840070

DOI: 10.1257/jel.20231700

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2025-09-27
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04840070