Charles F. Roos, Harold T. Davis and the Quantitative Approach to Business Cycle Analysis at the Cowles Commission in the 1930s and early 1940s*

While much has been written about the history of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics after its move from Colorado Springs to Chicago in 1939, its earlier history under the first two Cowles Commission research directors, Charles F. Roos and Harold T. Davis, is little known. This paper examines their quantitative approach to business analysis, notably in Roos' 1934 Cowles monograph on Dynamic Economics and Davis's 1941 books on The Analysis of Economic Time Series and The Theory of Econometrics.