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on History and Philosophy of Economics |
| By: | Thomas Delcey (LEDi - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dijon [Dijon] - UBE - Université Bourgogne Europe); Aurélien Goutsmedt (ICHEC - Brussels Management School [Bruxelles], UCLouvain - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain); Alexandre Truc (GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion - UNS - Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (1965 - 2019) - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur) |
| Abstract: | This article demonstrates how unsupervised quantitative methods can enrich the history of economic thought. Using the largest English-language corpus ever assembled for the field—nearly 260, 000 economics journal articles from 1900 to 2009 with citation data—we analyze the evolution of the concept of rationality. Combining large language model–based semantic analysis with bibliometric and network methods, we identify and cluster discussions of rationality across time and scales, such as the emergence of a social view of rationality, the circulation of bounded rationality, and the emergence of behavioral economics. We provide an open-source interactive tool to support transparency and reuse. |
| Keywords: | Text mining, large language models, natural language processing, behavioral economics, bibliometrics, economics history, Bounded rationality, rationality |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05431080 |
| By: | Richard B. Freeman; Danxia Xie; Hanzhe Zhang; Hanzhang Zhou |
| Abstract: | We analyze the academic affiliations of nearly 6, 000 award-winning researchers in 18 major fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences from the 1820s to the 2020s, focusing on the 1960s onward. The analysis reveals a trend of declining concentration in the institutional affiliations of award-winning researchers, shifting from a few science-strong universities in high-income countries to a more diverse set of institutions across the world. The decline in concentration is observed in all fields except one: economics. The institutional affiliations of prizewinning economists have become more concentrated over time, making economics the most concentrated field. We associate the higher concentration of prizewinning work in economics with the field’s stronger sorting by institutional prestige, its lower reliance on specialized equipment and instruments, and its assessment of findings based on a synthesis of evidence rather than on decisive experiments or proofs. We discuss the benefits and costs of this high and rising institutional concentration of prizewinning economists. |
| JEL: | A11 A12 A14 I23 J44 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35875 |
| By: | Maxime Merli (LARGE - Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg); Antoine Parent (IXXI - Institut Rhône-Alpin des systèmes complexes - ENS de Lyon - École normale supérieure de Lyon - Université de Lyon - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon - UCBL - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 - Université de Lyon - INSA Lyon - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon - Université de Lyon - INSA - Institut National des Sciences Appliquées - Inria - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we unearth a forgotten study of Pierre Des Essars, the director of research at the Banque de France in the late 19th century, enriched with comments from contemporary financial analysts. Des Essars provides the first and only existing example of the actual composition of French individual portfolios during the Belle Époque. By revisiting what is generally taught, our analyses show that many of the intuitions of "finance for normal people" were already present in the financial analysts' writings during the Belle Époque. Specifically, we show in an unprecedented way that these writings prefigure behavioral portfolio theory word for word a century before its emergence. In addition, our findings highlight that this popular science of investment was born from observations of individual portfolios and the objective of providing financial education for the masses. Finally, we reveal strong invariants in the construction of behavioral finance versus standard finance a century apart. |
| Keywords: | N23, N20, G15, G14, behavioral portfolio theory | cognitive psychology | finance for normal people | rationality of individual investors JEL Classification: G11, behavioral portfolio theory | cognitive psychology | finance for normal people | rationality of individual investors JEL Classification: G11 G14 G15 N20 N23 |
| Date: | 2025–01–27 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05775271 |
| By: | Geir B. Asheim; Wolfgang Buchholz |
| Abstract: | How should the interests of different generations be balanced when considering both the issue of taming the extreme demands by strong longtermism on the present as well as ensuring a sustainable development that protects the well-being of generations in the far future? We adopt a pluralistic ethical approach which determines sets of intergenerational distributions that are robustly deemed morally unacceptable by considering only comparisons where there is unanimity among all elements in an entire class of commonly accepted distributional norms. In the setting of a simple technological environment we demonstrate that any morally unacceptable stream is dominated in terms of the moral criterion by some morally permissible stream. Furthermore, we show that increased productivity and an extended time horizon make it morally permissible for the present generation to incur greater sacrifices for future—in line with longtermism—while not obliging it to renounce an equal share of well-being. |
| Keywords: | longtermism, sustainable development, intertemporal social choice |
| JEL: | D63 Q01 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13038 |
| By: | Eric Vansteenberghe |
| Abstract: | Two coefficients enter nearly every quantitative argument about monetary policy: the Phillips-curve slope and the policy rule's response to inflation. For seventy years, each generation that estimated them identified the coefficient conditional on assumptions it maintained, and its successor relaxed one of them, naming the bias this exposed. This survey reconstructs the two programs as a single identification problem. It distinguishes five senses in which a coefficient has been called identified, reads each generation of the curve and of the rule in that key, and shows that the programs fail together because each borrows its identifying condition from the other. The same sequence ran on the latent inflation target and on the optimal rule. The survey closes on what the credible designs license when they leave a range rather than a point: bounds, signs and orderings, and decisions designed for a range. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.06007 |