Work in progress

One Sentence at a Time: A Quantitative History of Rationality in Economic Thought

Working paper

Thomas Delcey, Aurelien Goutsmedt, Alexandre Truc

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 290,000 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 circulation of bounded rationality and the emergence of behavioral economics. We provide an open-source interactive tool to support transparency and reuse.

The Dissemination of Fama (1970): A Bibliometric Analysis

Working paper

What is the life of a seminal paper? This article addresses this question by studying the dissemination of Fama (1970), which introduced the efficient market hypothesis. Using network analysis, I study the various groups of research that cite Fama (1970) and how they evolve over time. I show that the paper was not only a canonical article in economics but also a reference in other fields such as law, management, and marketing. Market efficiency was interpreted in various ways, from a testable hypothesis about the behavior of prices to a useful assumption for evaluating policies. By tracing the various pathways through which this seminal article was exported and translated, the analysis shows the rising influence of finance across the social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. The article also contributes to the development of quantitative methods applied to the history of economics by providing an interactive, open-source platform that allows users to explore networks and clusters. The article is available in pdf.