Is Financial Economics a Science? If So, What Kind of Science?

• In Event: 4110 - Finance and Its Challengers

Abstract

In this paper, I turn the question about the scientific status of the discipline into two empirical questions concerning the degree to which finance is scientific, and the kind of science financial economists pursue. Focusing on articles published in the Journal of Finance between 1950 and 2000, I investigate the forms and practices financial economists came to rely upon to communicate their results to one another. I document the ways in which financial economics changed as mathematics and statistics became dominant, and how, in particular, mathematics and statistics changed the affective dispositions of financial economists. I analyze how financial scholars used specific communicative practices and inscription devices as a function of how they conceptualized expertise. I draw the more general lesson that techniques of quantitative analysis are no substitute for relationships of trust among knowledge producers, while pointing to the limited role numbers play in the construction of social knowledge when they are not backed by social relationships.

Author

• Simone Polillo, University of Virginia