Speakers：Koji YAMAMOTO [University of Tokyo],　Shaun YAJIMA [University of Tokyo]

Date：November 1, 2022／15:00‐16:40 (JST)

Location：Zoom

Language：Japanese

Target:：Open to the public

Abstract：This presentation seeks to contribute to the development of economic theory based on detailed qualitative analysis of historical evidence - what Clifford Geertz called 'thick descriptions'. Ever since the so-called "empirical revolution" of the 1990s, economics has become less and less deductive, and has now been dominated by research methods using 'real-world' data. While this trend incorporates methods using historical data, it has tended to concentrate on searching through the data to elucidate macro phenomena like economic growth and long-term institutional change. When scholars use historical setting in other ways, their accounts are very often concerned with exploiting quasi natural experiments in order to identify causality. This is unfortunate because historical scholarship is often at its best when engaging closely with unpublished sources such as manuscript letters, diaries, and meeting minutes. We are yet to do justice to these rich sources in the service of economics. This leads to the central question of our presentation: How might research after the empirical revolution evolve if we begin to take seriously the vast amount of qualitative information on the attitudes and decision-making processes of historical actors?

With this in mind, we provide an overview of the relevant fields, and present preliminary case studies of historical economic actors. We ask how stereotypes and image concerns influence the decision-making processes. Many recent laboratory and field-based economic experiments have shown that perceptions held by others often shape the behavior of economic agents. We have been analyzing letters and internal corporate documents of early modern England and modern Germany to learn how the economic agents of the time perceived and responded to savage satire and public criticism. These historical case studies contain a wealth of information on the decision-making of economic agents in the face of negative public perceptions. We will conclude by speculating on the kinds of lessons economists might draw from these historical case studies.