The State of the Art of Economic History: The Uneasy Relation with Economics

Martina Cioni, Giovanni Federico and Michelangelo Vasta

No 20210067, Working Papers from New York University Abu Dhabi, Department of Social Science

Abstract: This paper assesses the state of the art of economic history, focusing on recent changes that have recently characterized the field. We rely on a new database of almost 2,700 articles published from 2001 to 2018 in the top-five economic history journals and in 13 leading economics journals. We argue that economic history still remains a distinct field. The share of economic history articles in economics journals increased very little and only few authors published in both economics and economic history journals. Publishing in top-five economic journals yields more citations than in top-field journals, but this is not necessarily true for other prestigious economic journals. Finally, we speculate on the future. Will economic history lose its soul and become a sub-field of development studies? Will persistence studies become a separate field? Or, perhaps, a new synthesis will emerge, with scholars dealing with traditional and new research questions with a wide range of tools? JEL

Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2021-06, Revised 2021-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-his, nep-hpe and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://nyuad.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyuad/academics/ ... papers/2021/0067.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nad:wpaper:20210067

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from New York University Abu Dhabi, Department of Social Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alizeh Batra ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).