The article traces one of the first steps in the Russian economic literature of the Russian diaspora in combining economic theory with quantitative methods (statistics) and the creation of econometrics. The pioneers in this direction were A.A. Chuprov and S.S. Cohn, who performed in the mid-1920s in emigrant publications with program articles in which a statistical-economic approach was formulated, which became a step towards the formation of econometrics. S.S. Cohn was one of two scientists living in Czechoslovakia who were invited in 1930 to be founding members of the International Econometric Society in the United States. In Russia, the initiator of the statistical approach was P.B. Struve, who in his work “Economy and Price” (1913, 1916) formulated the basic principles and motives of such a methodology. However, this approach was not developed in Russia until 1917.