Dr Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay was a postdoctoral assistant at the Centre Walras-Pareto in Lausanne. He holds a PhD in history of economic thought from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Université de Lausanne. He also holds a Masters in economics & philosophy from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, as well as an MSc in economics and a BSc in mathematics from the Université de Montréal. 

Research Interests

Maxime’s research interests are in the recent history and the philosophical foundations of the modern theory of public finance. His research has focused on the contribution of Richard A. Musgrave to the modernisation of public finance and the emergence of public economics. He has conducted extensive conceptual analysis of public goods and merit goods. He is interested in the contextual history of economics, as well as in its philosophical underpinnings, both from the internal perspective of economic methodology, and from the perspective of political philosophy. He is currently devising a new research program on the different ways economists conceptualise the common interest. This will include, among other things, a study of the contribution of Elinor Ostrom to the transformation of economics into a more applied and empirical discipline.

Publications

Desmarais-Tremblay, Maxime. 2017. Musgrave, Samuelson, and the Crystallization of the Standard Rationale for Public Goods. History of Political Economy, 49(1): 59-92.

Desmarais-Tremblay, Maxime. 2017. A Genealogy of the Concept of Merit Wants. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 24(3):  409-440.

Desmarais-Tremblay, Maxime. 2014. Normative and Positive Theories of Public Finance: Contrasting Musgrave and Buchanan. Journal of Economic Methodology, 21(3): 273-289.