Abstract: This paper conjectures that economics has changed profoundly since the 1970s and that these changes involve a new understanding of the relationship between theoretical and applied work. Drawing on an analysis of John Bates Clark medal winners, it is suggested that the discipline became...

In this paper, we build on data on Fed officials, oral history repositories, and hitherto under-researched archival sources to unpack the torturous path toward crafting an institutional and intellectual space for postwar economic analysis within the Federal Reserve. We show that growing...

The field of ‘Urban Economics’ is an elusive object, whose US-based origins and internationalization we attempt to track in this paper. The most stable and distinctive object associated with the term ‘urban economics’ is the Alonso-Muth-Mills model. We thus reconstruct the field through...

Before the John Bates Clark Medal (JBCM) has become a widely acknowledged professional and public marker of excellence in economics research, in the first twenty years since its inception more than seventy years ago in 1947 it was almost discontinued three times and once even not conferred....

This short paper offers some reflections on the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize awarded to Paul Romer. We describe the intellectual path that led him to embed endogenously-generated knowledge in growth models, a contribution that we believe was foremost a mathematical achievement. Accordingly, we...

This paper is a history of the first gender reckoning in U.S. economics, which began in the early 1970s. Based on hitherto closed archives of the American Economic Association (AEA), we reconstruct the historical context that led to the establishment of the Committee on the Status of Women in...

This paper seeks to convince historians of economics to blog and tweet. It outlines the costs and benefits of doing so, and argues that social media thoroughly alter our research process, from data gathering to writing, collaborating, sharing and hacking, showcasing history and interacting with...

In this paper, we build on data on Fed officials, oral history repositories and hitherto under-researched archival sources to unpack the torturous path toward crafting an institutional and intellectual space for postwar economic analysis within the Fed. We show that growing attention to new...