Oxford’s Contributions to Econometrics

Abstract

Faculty and graduates of the University of Oxford 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 seventeenth century, William Petty created a discipline that he called Political Arithmetick, a forerunner of quantitative economics that led to the more specialised statistical approach of econometrics. During the first half of the twentieth century, Oxford scholars like Colin Clark made major advances in creating aggregate economic measurements. From the late 1970s, the focus was primarily on macroeconometrics for the remainder of that century, buttressed by research on methods for analysing dynamic panels. In the twenty-first century, micro-econometrics was added to the portfolio. The most recent addition is climate econometrics, developing and applying econometric tools for analysing climate data, which is driven by human economic behaviour and so faces much the same slew of problems as macroeconomic time series.