LSE Collaborative Studentship with Trades Union Congress

This paper presents yearly estimates of income inequality in Italy from 1900 to 1950. By constructing dynamic social tables (DSTs), we comprehensively…

Economic history is increasingly able to provide us with evidence and inform pressing questions at the intersection of research and real-world decision-making. This column uses natural language processing and network analysis of articles from five leading journals over the past 25 years to identify a shift towards a more global, data-driven, and methodologically advanced field. It maps changing thematic priorities, institutional collaborations, and author networks, highlighting both a generational turnover and growing geographical diversity. It also reveals a strong move towards causal identification-based econometrics alongside a sharp decline in qualitative research, signalling both convergence and trade-offs in the discipline’s integration with mainstream economics.