With this 2nd international conference on “Cliometrics and Complexity”, our ambition is to stimulate new approaches to Economic History by drawing inspiration from complex systems modeling in Mathematics, Physics and Econophysics. The goal of this conference is to reach a renewed understanding of the underlying dynamics of historical and social systems and to enrich our knowledge of the past, bringing together complex systems modeling and Cliometrics.
The interaction between Cliometrics and Complexity has a wide range of dimensions, including methodological dimensions that are related to the choice of relevant tools and methods; epistemological dimensions that are linked to the way researchers conceive their objects of research and paradigms; dimensions that are related to the heuristic scope of these alternative approaches of economic and social complex systems; and dimensions that are related to our capacity to produce models providing policy-makers with a relevant prospective and useful expertise.
We conceive this 2nd conference as the right place to facilitate collaborations between disciplines. Our wish, in the continuation of the first conference, is to gather cliometricians, historians, economists, econometricians, researchers in finance, social scientists, physicists, econo-physicists, mathematicians, researchers in signal processing and in data analytics. For its second edition, the conference wishes to focus on 4 core issues related to the analysis of history:
The first axis will illustrate the contribution of complex network analysis to economic history. Network analysis allows to study the successive stable states in a network of interactions at various points in history. Topological analysis would help to reveal some underlying principles of organization of “societies”, conceived as agents’ interaction, in history. The originality will consist, here, in making the analysis of complex networks another tool of the cliometric understanding of history.
The second axis will be devoted to “Empirical history and non-linear dynamics”: indeed, the recent burst in the study of non-linear and/or non-stationary dynamics has led to a significant number of innovative approaches attempting to explain observed deviations from usual properties such as normality and simple correlations. In this vein, we encourage any submission that can illustrate the contribution of non-linear analysis to economic history.
The third axis will be devoted to “Building empirical and theoretical economic history”. The need for theoretical approaches of chaos, complexity and history is obvious. How can complex approaches in cliometrics question standard assumptions and axioms in economics (equilibrium, maximization principle, optimality, efficiency, etc.)? How to deal with financial markets complexity due to the heterogeneous nature of economic agents’ beliefs? Can we imagine building chaotic representations of history?
A fourth axis will be specifically devoted to econophysics and its realizations, and will engage a reflection towards the modalities and possibilities to expand econophysics to history. The reference econophysics literature usually focuses on the contemporary era. The development of historical financial databases allows to implement the econophysics methodology in a long term perspective, in order to question conventional wisdom in the field of financial macroeconomics.
Submissions in these 4 axes are encouraged, but without any exclusive regarding the method, and with no limitation either concerning the topics.
The Call is now closed.