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The Journal of economic history, 2015-06, Vol.75 (2), p.531-562
Ort / Verlag
New York, USA: Cambridge University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2015
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
With last year marking the 40th anniversary of the formal establishment of the Allan Nevins prize for the best dissertation in American economic history, I thought it fitting to begin my remarks about the 2014 panelists by reflecting on the history of the Nevins prize itself. The dissertation topics of Nevins prize finalists are a sign of upcoming trends in economic history. In his year as prize convener, Paul Rhode (2004) argued that we can read the set of Nevins dissertations like tea leaves to discern the future direction of the profession (p. 579). More than just reading the tea leaves, I suggest that we can analyze the data on the dissertation topics selected by Nevins prize finalists to determine trends in the field over time. My inspiration in doing so is Robert Margo's (2011) cliometric history of the American Economic Review, which uses the content of the journal as the basis of a theoretically informed intellectual history of the economics profession. To measure changes over time in the dissertation topics selected for the Nevins panel, I classified the titles of dissertations by topic area according to the JEL coding scheme.