This paper deals with the African Americans who gained PhDs in economics, from the first in 1921 until 1943, roughly the first generation of African Americans with doctorates in economics. All through their student and post-student lives, they faced barriers and limitations thrown up by racial discrimination, with sometimes disheartening results. The paper charts the paths they took to achieve their PhDs, their thesis topics, and descriptions of their later career contributions. Virtually all came to work on issues central to African American interests and civil rights issues in general. Their careers centered on HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) and African American organizations such as the National Urban League or NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), or were in government agencies—especially those concerned with wartime labor and production issues or with housing. They contributed not just to economics and economic policy but to the struggle for civil rights. The door to the economics profession had been essentially closed to Black people prior to 1920. This is the group that began to push that door open.

This paper analyzes John Stuart Mill’s stand towards the American Civil War and slavery, taking as a background his views on human nature and on the role played by public opinion, as well as his political concerns about the future of democracy. At first, when the majority of the English supported the Confederates, Mill’s efforts were directed at altering this stand, which he believed dishonored the name of England. Afterwards, his attention turned to the conditions necessary to guarantee the effective emancipation of Blacks in America after a Union victory. The result of this engagement was the production of extensive war-related material—essays, newspaper articles, and numerous private letters he exchanged with English and American correspondents. Although this material is fragmentary and heterogeneous, when interpreted in the broader context of his social views it reveals not only the importance that the issue of slavery had for him but also the complex views he had of this phenomenon and how to eliminate it—views that involved philosophical, economic, sociological, political, and, above all, moral aspects.

Chile’s 1860 Banking Law established a system of free banking that seems similar to the Scottish one. It may not be a coincidence. The drafter of the law was Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, an admirer of Adam Smith on money and banking and of the Scottish free banking system, thus making Adam Smith’s banking ideas a contributing influence (so far, unrecognized) on Chilean free banking.

The field of “urban economics” is an elusive object whose US-based origins, development, and internationalization we attempt to document in this paper. To flesh out urban economists’ territory, we rely on a mix of quantitative analysis (networks of authors most cited alongside the foundational contributions of William Alonso, Richard Muth, and Edwin Mills) and archival research. We identify several periods in the development of American urban economics, including a taking-off in the 1960s, fueled by scholarly contributions, urban riots, and foundations’ grants; a marginalization in the 1980s; and a recent renewal where urban economists grappled with the theoretical legacy of the New Economic Geography, and with the transfer of new empirical techniques from neighboring fields.

This study examines the political economy of international trade and perpetual peace proposed by the agronomist Jean-Baptiste Rougier-Labergerie under the French Directory. Drawing on Rougier-Labergerie’s treatise on commerce and peace, this article shows how a political economy that was rooted in natural jurisprudence navigated the challenges of subsistence and war through turbulent times that extended beyond the Thermidor. Similar to eighteenth-century intellectuals who witnessed large-scale wars waged with public debt in the name of national interest, Rougier-Labergerie considered the possibility of peace and prosperity to be intricately linked to the question of commercial rivalry between nations. He thereby recognized the pressing need to mitigate—by different means from those deployed by the radicals of Year II—the jealousy of trade that plagued Europe in the 1790s. This examination provides a more nuanced dimension to the established categories in historical inquiries into the international political economy of the revolutionary period.

From the 1960s, the rising volatility of financial markets in the US troubled econometricians and bank managers alike. Both found it increasingly difficult to forecast savings deposit flows. This article explores these challenges by focusing on two developments. First, it analyzes the adjustment process among econometric models of the savings deposit market. I combine the analysis of the FMP model used by the Fed since 1970 and the deposit model of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS), thereby pioneering the historical analysis of econometric models built by private financial institutions. I find that economists failed to discover timeless determinants for deposit flows. Second, I explore how the conditions of the savings deposit market shaped the demand for macroeconomic forecast models, using the PSFS as a case study. I show that while the rising volatility led bank managers to seek sophisticated tools to predict deposit flows, the deregulation of the banking industry put the forecasting quality of macroeconomic models for individual banks to the test.

The visibility of Karl Marx in England had a “major breakthrough” according to Kirk Willis (1977): the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital in English in 1887. Although Willis provides a quantitative description of mentions of Marx based on library records, book circulation statistics, and newspaper references, the attribution of the effect of Marx’s visibility to a single event remains a simplification of a complex process. The specificities of late Victorian society and the fact that Marx wrote his theoretical works in German contributed to his near anonymity in England up to the second half of the 1880s. The liberal radical roots of the left-wing intellectuals and of the working class movements, together with the strong parliamentary tradition, constituted a challenging environment for the spread of Marx’s name. With data from Google Ngram, this study adopts the synthetic control method and finds that 1886 is a breakthrough year for the mentions of Marx in England. This is combined with a qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources and of the contextual nature of the interest in Marx in several literary genres. The paper complements Willis’s study by shedding light on the developments preceding 1887. In this period the surge of interest in Marx was driven by a growing fear of socialism and his mentions shift from partly generic to distinctly political. This shift was triggered by a combination of factors, including the economic crisis and rising unemployment of the mid-1880s, episodes of social unrest, key editorial developments, and the efforts of Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, and many others in promoting the socialist cause. These conditions broadened public perceptions of socialist imminence and contributed to the semiotic diffusion of Marx’s name even before 1887.

Several recent works have explored Wassily Leontief’s distinction between standard econometrics, which he called “indirect statistical inference,” and a “direct induction” he called “direct observation.” These works usually understand Leontief’s direct induction through the lens of input-output analysis. I argue that this is too narrow a perspective. Instead, I show how this distinction stemmed from Leontief’s (1929, 1932a) econometric work, when he developed a statistical technique for determining supply and demand curves. From lesser-known published texts by Leontief from this period, as well as unpublished material from the archives, it appears that Leontief’s distinction was in part borrowed from Jacob Marschak (1931) when they were both in Germany. Like Marschak, Leontief distinguished between two epistemic strategies: indirect, using data from the marketplace, i.e., price-quantity data; or direct, using specific data separately on buyers (e.g., household surveys) and on sellers (e.g., plant surveys). This result fundamentally revises our understanding of Leontief’s view of econometrics.