Tableaux économiques et analyse des business cycles chez Marschak, Frisch et Leontief[Tableau Economique and business cycle analysis in the works of Marschak, Frisch and Leontief]

Ragnar Frisch wrote in 1933 that "The complete macrodynamic problem, as I conceive of it, consists in describing as realistically as possible the kind of relations that exist between the various magnitudes in the Tableau Economique ..., and from the nature of these relations to explain the movements, cyclical or otherwise, of the system." My paper examines how the so-called Tableau Economique was employed by three major economists of the 20th century to make mathematical models in order to analyze business cycles, i.e. Jacob Marschak, Ragnar Frisch and Wassily Leontief. We show that the three of them used intersectorial tables to build mathematical models of business cycles. Theoretical mechanisms behind the model are very different between the three models and were inspired by Marxian, Austrian and Walrasian economics. Hence, the same interindustrial Tableau Economique supported very different analyses of business cycles. These works of Marschak, Frisch and Leontief implemented original concepts and tools like dynamic modeling, expectation theory, collective welfare functions, national accounting, and matrix algebra.