Abstract
While first highlighted by Romer (J Econ Educ 25:49–66, 1994), economic history has only continued to become more integrated into the broader discipline. This paper utilizes a sample of recent articles in top Economics journals to help assess what characteristics economic history papers share and a sample of recent graduate syllabi to examine the role that a required economic history class can play more broadly in the training of economists. The samples confirm that economic history research utilizing a wide range of topics and tools is being published in top economics journals and taught in economic history classes. The findings suggest that economic history is a complement to the research of other fields and that a required economic history class offers an early applied course that could help students regardless of what field they go on to pursue.
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Notes
The specific journals were chosen because they report JEL codes on every article published. Other top journals do not report them in their webpage or in the printed articles. I do not include comments or responses as part of the survey nor articles from the Papers and Proceedings edition of the American Economic Review.
I do not include papers that do not have a dominant noneconomic history field in the calculations. Typically, these papers have fields that tend to be closely related (e.g., Macroeconomics and Financial Economics or Labor Economics and Health Economics).
These findings match a lot of the benefits of economic history reported by studies such as McCloskey (1976) and Goldin (1995).
It is helpful to note that few studies in the top journals came directly out of someone’s dissertation. Most consist of multiple coauthors that are relatively older. The sample of economic history papers is no different.
Fitting this idea, the required courses at the University of California-Berkeley and Yale University have both been recently team taught.
Harvard University explicitly highlights that their breadth requirements are “to ensure that students are exposed to non-standard ways of thinking about issues central to economics”.
In fact, the data created by economic historians often form the basis for future works by other scholars. Both of the top economic history field journals (i.e., the Journal of Economic History and Explorations in Economic History) require authors to make code and data available before publication.
Looking at the two schools that require students to choose from a small list of electives (of which economic history is one), Harvard University encourages students to take it in their first year, while the University of Southern California does not specify.
Unlike the core courses which are mostly test-based grading, nearly all of the field course syllabi that I could obtain focused on reading papers and culminated in a writing assignment. In this way, the required economic history courses seem to be based on a field course structure rather than a standard core theory course structure.
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Jaremski, M. Today’s economic history and tomorrow’s scholars. Cliometrica 14, 169–180 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-019-00188-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-019-00188-9