This paper seeks to convince historians that asking how tractability has shaped individual and collective modeling choices in economics is a worthy question. To do so, I first survey the economic methodology literature on tractability, one that grew out of methodologists’ attempts to dissect...

This paper documents the disciplinary exchanges between economists and engineers at Stanford throughout the 20th century. We elucidate how this cross-fertilization was mediated by the institutional structure of the university. We outline the role of key scholars such as Kenneth Arrow and Robert...

Walter Heller's success in convincing JF Kennedy to pass a "tax cut" when he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the 1960s is often heralded as the poster child for economists' policy influence, yet also sometimes seen as a lost golden age. The purpose of this paper is to...

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...

According to its creator Michel Juillard, Dynare is a “pre-processor and a collection of routines” aimed at solving and estimating non-linear rational expectation models. This article focuses on the role of Dynare in the dissemination of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models...

In this paper, we trace the rise of heterogeneous household models in mainstream macroeconomics from the turn of the 1980s to the early 2000s, at the moment when this set of models became an identifiable consistent literature. We show that different communities across the US and Europe...

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...

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...