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...

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 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...

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...

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 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 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...