Toward a richer history of the representative agent: the contributions of Tjalling Koopmans and Paul Samuelson before Robert Lucas

• Ano de defesa: 2018
• Autor(a) principal: Wei, Hugo Chu Chun
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Agente representativo; Paul Samuelson; Representative agent; Tjalling Koopmans
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12140/tde-30112018-120424/

The Representative Agent is nowadays a ubiquitous methodological tool used in modern economics. However its history is not fully developed. This thesis contributes to fill that gap by analyzing three separate, yet overlapping, contexts. The first chapter examines the rise of the representative consumer from the 1950s to the 1970s in the contributions to intertemporal economics by Tjalling Koopmans. In the first decade, the 1950s, Koopmans was an important figure in the Cowles Commission\'s incursion into decision theory, and, as an econometrician, an active participant in the debate on aggregation problems in economics. In the 1960s, Koopmans wrote the bulk of his contributions to the subfield of infinite horizon economies (including his optimal growth model) and it is in this decade that he fully articulated his views on the representative agent. Finally, in the 1970s, Koopmans continued contributing to the preference-based approach to individual decision-making leading to his intertemporally separable utility functions. Over these three decades, Koopmans went from an ambiguous stance toward the representative consumer to a more supportive one. Interestingly, his 1965 growth paper, that helped spread the use of the representative agent in macroeconomics, can be seen as a turning point. Part of this change is due to the ever-increasing use of the device in macroeconomics, a movement that he did not initiate but helped intensify. The second chapter asks whether the representative agent might have emerged as the outcome of transformations that occurred in microeconomics from the 1930s throughout the 1940s, especially in the subfield of demand theory. To tell this story, I begin with a particular historical interpretation of this subfield, propounded by Wade Hands and Philip Mirowski in the 1990s, centered on the theoretical formulations and the ensuing econometric testing of the system of demand functions that involved the mathematician Harold Hotelling and the economist Henry Schultz, known as the Hotelling-Schultz impasse. Although this impasse was abandoned by the end of the 1930s, this debate continued in the profession, including at the Cowles Commission, then directed by Koopmans. He played an important role in the emergence of the representative agent in the microeconomics of aggregation problems. The significance of Paul Samuelson\'s introduction of homothetic preferences into general equilibrium theory and its connection to Koopmans\'s writings during the 1950s is also scrutinized. The third chapter identifies the emergence of the representative agent in the development of the optimal growth literature. Although Paul Samuelson used infinitely-lived representative consumers to shed light on macroeconomic topics in his works from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, this tool only gained more adepts after it was \"agreed upon\" at the beginning of the 1960s. It is shown that the main center of research in growth economics at the time, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), by congregating faculty members and graduate students working with the golden rule of growth as well as the turnpike theory, helped sanction the representative agent as a legitimate tool for macroeconomic investigations. Furthermore, in communities beyond MIT, economists such as Koopmans and Lionel McKenzie could have also played a role in spreading the methodological device, given the possible sway Samuelson had on them.