PURPOSE
The Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University has as its purpose
the conduct and encouragement of research in economics and related fields. The Cowles
Foundation seeks to foster the development and application of rigorous logical,
mathematical, and statistical methods of analysis. Among its activities, the Cowles
Foundation provides financial support for research, visiting faculty, postdoctoral
fellowships, workshops, and graduate students. Cowles regularly sponsors conferences and
publishes a working paper series, a reprint series, and monographs.
RESEARCH PROGRAMS
The Cowles Foundation provides support for research and research related activities
through Research Programs in four core areas of interest to Cowles: Econometrics, Economic Theory, Macroeconomics, and Structural
Microeconomics. Each of these broad areas has deep ties to the Cowles tradition and
provides a foundation for other fields of inquiry in economics and related fields. Cowles
Program Areas sponsor visiting faculty and post-docs, organize conferences, and provide
other research resources at Yale.
From time to time, Cowles also sponsors shorter-term research initiatives in areas of
emerging interest. Currently, Cowles is supporting a special initiative in Optimization.
RESEARCH STAFF
Members of the Cowles Research Staff are, as a rule, faculty
members with appointments and teaching responsibilities in the Department of Economics and other departments at
Yale.
BRIEF HISTORY
The Cowles Foundation continues the work of the Cowles Commission for Research in
Economics, founded in 1932 by Alfred Cowles at Colorado Springs. The Commission moved to
Chicago in 1939 and was affiliated with the University of Chicago until 1955. In 1955
the professional research staff of the Commission accepted appointments at Yale and, along
with other members of the Yale Department of Economics, formed the research staff of the
newly established Cowles Foundation.
In the words of Kenneth Boulding, University of Michigan:
Econometrics has been one of the most significant 'growing points' of economics in the
past 20 years. It is not however a 'school' in the sense of the 'Austrian School',
contending for the supremacy of its theoretical position against other schools, so much as
a 'movement', finding its bond of unity in the common skills and methods of its adherents
rather than in any uniformity of theoretical position. The nerve center of this world
movement is unquestionably the Cowles Commission.
And in the words of Carl Christ, Johns Hopkins University:
...much of the work of the Cowles Commission is of an abstract nature, and many of its
fruits are not likely to be reaped in the immediate future. Nevertheless, its work is
connected in a very real way with the fundamental problems of a free and democratic
society. It is by learning to predict in detail the consequences of general economic and
social policies that we will be best able as a society to achieve desirable objectives
without resort to direct controls over individual economic behavior. In the direction of
learning to predict, research like that of the Cowles Commission should continue to yield
important dividends in the future.
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