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 tracks economists' rising, yet elusive and unstable interest in collective decision mechanism after World War II. We replace their examination of voting procedures and social welfare functions in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of their growing involvement with policy-making....

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 more...

This paper introduces twin special issues of the Revue d’Economie Politique on the role that seminars, workshops and conferences have played in the history of economics in the 20th century. Our goal is to turn what have been a systematic background feature in the history of key concepts,...

This paper seeks to convince historians that asking how and how much tractability has shaped individual and collective modeling choices in economics is a worthy question. To do so, I survey some of the few instances where economists explicitly discussed the importance of tractability in their...

A quantitative turn in history of economic thought is looming. We argue that engineering it consicously is of crucial importance for historians of economics. We also highlight the limitations of quantitative techniques.Yet, the combination of qualitative and quantitative research could...

This paper offers a historical perspective on economists' treatment of women, through exploring the case of Paul Samuelson. Some of his remarks about women in the economy and in economics were famously considered deprecatory. We place them in the context of the discussions of discrimination in...