The Usefulness of Mathematical Tools for Economic Analysis

The current financial crisis generated a large debate for the degree to which the mathematical models are relevant for decision making in business and macroeconomic analysis. Instruments like Value-at-Risk, Copula functions and regressions were almost ”negotiated” in the non-specialized literature. The use of the mathematical tools in the economics profession and research probably started with the creation of the Econometrics Society in the 1930s and the foundation of the journal Econometrica, which, according to ISI Thomson Relative Influence Score, is the most prestigeous journal in the field of Applied Mathematics. This paper takes into account the ideas of normal distributions and the concepts of regression and factor analysis to present the way in which these mathematical models succeeded to create new ways of development in the field of economics.