From real business cycle and new Keynesian to DSGE Macroeconomics: facts and models in the emergence of a consensus

Macroeconomists have emphasized the force of facts in forging a consensus understanding of business cycle fluctuations. According to this view, rival economists could no longer hold disparate views on the topic because “facts have a way of not going away” (Blanchard 2009). But how can macroeconomists observe the workings of an economy? Essentially through building and manipulating models. Thus the construction of macroeconomic facts –or “stylized facts”–, empirical regularities that come to be widely accepted, opens up technical spaces where macroeconomists negotiated their theoretical commitments and eventually allowed a consensus to emerge. I argue that this is an important element in the history of the DSGE macroeconomics.