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...

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...

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...

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 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 tells the development of economics at MIT between 1940 and 1972. The recruitment of Samuelson in 1940 fostered the establishment of a small community of economists within an engineering institute which was itself undergoing major transformations. A “new economics” was then shaped...