Although Cournot's mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid-1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts even before his “discovery” by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the...

This paper is an exploration of the genesis of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) from the perspective of his commitment to Edwin B. Wilson's mathematics. The paper sheds new lights on Samuelson's Foundations at two levels. First, Wilson's foundational ideas, embodied in...

Arthur Okun - teacher at Yale in the 1950s, member and later Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors in the 1960s, and Fellow of the Brookings Institution throughout the 1970s - was one of the three or four most important macroeconomists of the past twenty years. He was perhaps...

Using information collected from American Economic Review publications of the last 100 years, we try to provide answers to various questions: Which are the top AER publishing institutions and countries? Which are the top AER papers based on citation success? How frequently is someone able to...

In this paper, we show that Paul Samuelson (1915-2009), renowned as one of the main advocates of the mathematization of economics, has also contributed to the change of the place of visual representation in the discipline. In his early works (e.g. Foundations of Economic Analysis published in...

When we take seriously Smiths's oft-expressed admiration for the "beauty of a systematical arrangement of different observations connected by a few common principles" (WN, V.i.f.25) and seek those"connecting principles" within his own system of thought, his "positive index of welfare" loses its...

While there can be no disputing Smith's clear intent to employ his labor-commanded unit as a medium of value measure, we are still left with the problem of reconciling the multiple forms and characteristics taken on by this measure and the various applications to which it is put.That is the task...

For more than one decade, Hayek's theory of cultural evolution has been the object of a double controversy, with scientific and philosophical aspects. What is in discussion is nothing less than the existence of inner contradictions in the work of the Austrian Nobel prize winner. Apparently...