Is economic history changing its nature? Evidence from top journals

Abstract

A recent stream of literature argues that economic history is expanding its aim of looking for the historical roots of current outcomes (persistence studies) and that it is increasingly integrating with economics. This paper tests these claims with a new database of about 2500 articles published from 2001 to 2018 in the top five economic history journals and in eight leading economics journals. Our results do not confirm this optimistic narrative. Despite a growing interest by economists, economic history and a fortiori persistence studies are still marginal in economics journals. Furthermore, substantial differences between articles in the two groups of outlets are visible. Only a few authors have published in both economics and economic history journals. Publishing in the top five economics journals yields more citations than in top-field journals, but this is not necessarily true for other prestigious economics journals.

Cliometrics and the Study of German History

“…We delimit ourselves in two important respects from these works: First, we give our approach much more structure by relying on a database -i.e., quantitative data -to trace the application of cliometric methods to the study of German history; second, we take all historiographical studies into account that make our threshold, no matter the subfield. As a positive side effect, our article complements the broader literature on the history of the historical discipline, especially in Germany (e.g., Iggers 2005;Raphael 2010;Buchner et al 2020;Wehrheim et al 2023), as well as of economic history research in general (e.g., Seltzer and Hamermesh 2018;Cioni et al 2020Cioni et al , 2022aCioni et al , 2022bLa Parra-Perez et al 2022).…”

“…The emphasis here is on "reviving" because economics journals evidently were the most important outlets in the 1970s and again in the early 1990s. This observation is intriguing insofar as the general literature on the development of economic history somewhat suggests a new trend towards publishing economic history research increasingly in economics journals over the recent decades (Cioni et al 2022a(Cioni et al , 2022b. As Figure 4 clarifies, this take does not hold concerning cliometric research on Germany.…”

“…There is one methodical aspect linked with the epochal focus that we want to tackle here, namely whether a clio paper tends to take a long-term or a short-term perspective. Recent research has suggested that economic history in general seems to be changing its nature in that a new sort of study, the persistence study, which uses a very long-time horizon and often, but not necessarily, explores natural experiments, has become more fashionable (Cioni et al 2022a(Cioni et al , 2022b. Our aim here is not to provide a full-fledged analysis because we see a lot of methodical issues.…”