Is History of Economics What Historians of Economic Thought Do? A Quantitative Investigation

This paper presents a quantitative investigation into the history of economic thought (HET). Building on previous work (Marcuzzo, Is History of Economic Thought a Serious Subject’, The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 1, 107–23, 2008; ‘A Slender Trunk and many Branches. The History of Economic Thought in Perspective, Past and Future’, in H. M. Krämer, H. Kurz and H. M. Trautwein (eds), Macroeconomics and the History of Economic Thought Festschrift in Honour of Harald Hagemann, Abingdon, Routledge, 171–80, 2012), we propose an empirical study with the aim of describing the dynamics of changes in HET in recent years, detecting three trends: 1) a sort of ‘stepping down from the shoulders of giants’, namely a move towards studies of ‘minor’ figures and/or economists from a more recent past; 2) the blossoming of archival research into unpublished work and correspondence; 3) less theory-laden investigations, connecting intellectual circles, linking characters and events. Using data from Econlit we show the evolution of the overall publication of HET articles (1955–2013) and of HET fully or partially specialized journals (1993–2013); for the latter, by devising proxies which are amenable to quantitative assessment, we demonstrate that there is some evidence to support these claims.