ABSTRACT
Econometrics was the most adventurous and successful innovation introduced into economics during the course of the last century. By turning economics into social physics, econometrics claimed to reach the heights of pure science. The perpetrators were a new generation of economists and statisticians, some of them immigrants from physics and mathematics, who challenged both the established references and routines of economics. As a result, econometrics proudly led to the professionalisation of the discipline, completely transforming its landscape and promising a new capacity for measurement, estimation, prediction and control.
