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...

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...

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...

The FMP model exemplifies the Keynesian models later criticized by Lucas, Sargent and others as conceptually flawed. For economists in the 1960s such models were “big science”, posing organizational as well as theoretical and empirical problems. It was part of an even larger industry in...

In this paper, we use archival sources, interviews, bibliometrics, text-mining and correspondance analysis to trace the development of a loose community of economists interested in indeterminacy and sunspots. We propose several explanations for the rise, marginalization and eventual...

In this paper, I suggest that the history of the classification used by the American Economic Association to list economic literature and scholars is a relevant proxy to understand the transformation of economics science throughout the 20th century. Successive classifications were fashioned...

It is widely accepted that economics has changed significantly since the 1970s with the development of new data sources, new methods of analysis and the computer. This paper argues that this transformation of the discipline involves more than just a rise of empirical work: it involves a new...

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....