Macroeconomists and stagflation: essays on the transformation of macroeconomics in the 1970s.

Summary This thesis takes as its object the transformations in macroeconomic analysis in the United States during the 1970s while questioning the way in which these transformations are studied and analyzed. From the perspective of factual history, the period seems to mark a break from the relative economic stability of the postwar period. This period of economic instability, known as stagflation, echoes the instability of macroeconomic theory in the United States. The consensus of the time, considered "Keynesian", was attacked by the so-called "monetarist" and "new classic" economists. The last of these groups is the "revolutionary" group, which is considered to have radically changed the discipline. The purpose of my dissertation is to study the influence of the New Classics on macroeconomics in the 1970s by mobilizing a historiographical apparatus that places the role played by stagflation at the heart of the study, and to confront the results of this study with the "conventional" history of macroeconomics. The thesis is structured around four independent articles. The first chapter compares the methodologies of Lucas and Sargent, and shows that the second attempts to give a more realistic character to the models of the New Classical Economy, by using rational expectations to describe different economic phenomena. The second chapter deals with the confrontation between Lucas and Sargent on the one hand, and the advocates of structural macroeconometric models on the other. Chapter 3 studies the evolution of Robert Gordon's work on inflation in the 1970s and documents the way in which he gradually adopted the natural rate of unemployment hypothesis. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on the empirical debates in the early 1980s around the Lucas crisis.