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Between the lines : A Computational Portrait of the French Economist in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Avec Nicolas Brisset et Raphaël Fèvre
This paper offers a computational portrait of the French economist in the mid-twentieth century, a period shaped by major economic, political, and ideological transformations. Based on a large-scale digital corpus of over 25,000 articles published in France between 1918 and 1960, the study examines how the figure of the economist was constructed and differentiated during this pivotal era. The analysis combines prosopographical methods with network analysis grounded in topic modeling, where authors are positioned according to the thematic proximity of their writings. This approach makes it possible to identify and characterize coexisting profiles of economists—including academics, engineers, and publicists—based on both their social positions and intellectual orientations.
Investigating the environmental and ecological divergence: a scientometrics and machine learning approach
Avec Alexandre Truc
This paper investigates the divergence and interrelations between environmental and ecological research through a combined scientometric and machine learning approach. We first develop a supervised machine learning classifier to construct a large-scale, curated corpus distinguishing environmental and ecological publications from major bibliographic databases. Building on this corpus, we apply scientometric methods—primarily bibliometric network analysis based on bibliographic coupling—to examine the structural relationships between environmental and ecological research. We analyze thematic proximities and distances, identify clusters of shared and field-specific research agendas, and trace the evolution of methodological approaches over time. Particular attention is given to patterns of convergence and divergence.
[Data Paper] The ExEco Corpus: A Textual Dataset of French Economic and Social Thought (1918-1960)
This paper presents the ExEco Corpus, a comprehensive textual dataset dedicated to the history of French economic and social thought between 1918 and 1960. This dataset was developed within the framework of the ANR ExEco project, which investigates the emergence of economic expertise in France. The corpus comprises 23,508 unique articles (26,418 entries) ex-tracted from eleven major periodicals, covering economics, sociology, and history. The dataset was constructed by digitizing and processing documents from JSTOR, Gallica, and Persée. A specific workflow combining Optical Character Recognition, Generative AI for metadata reconstruction, and rigorous manual cleaning was employed to ensure high-quality text and metadata.
Work in Progress
Go Green ? Analyzing the Depth of Individualistic Solutions in Ecological Economics
Avec Alexandre Truc
This paper examines the prominence and depth of individualistic policy solutions in ecological economics. Building on a theoretical framework on the relationship between economic expertise and public policy design, the study analyzes how policy recommendations are articulated within the ecological economics literature. Using machine learning methods, we automatically label articles along two dimensions: the underlying approach to action (individual versus collective) and the type of policy instrument proposed, such as nudges, taxes, quotas, or regulatory bans. This classification allows for a systematic assessment of the distribution of policy prescriptions across the field. The results shed light on the extent to which ecological economics relies on individual-level solutions, the diversity of instruments mobilized, and the coherence between theoretical critiques of mainstream economics and proposed policy responses.
Do Economists Still Make Policies ?
Avec Dorian Jullien
This paper revisits the question of whether economists still shape public policy by re-examining the concept of expertise in contemporary social sciences. Expertise has been addressed across multiple literatures, including the role of ideas, professionalization, epistemic communities, and performativity, yet these approaches often remain fragmented. To bridge these perspectives, the paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of the interdisciplinary literature on economic expertise in policy-making, identifying its main theoretical clusters and points of contention. On this basis, it proposes an operational definition of expertise suited to the analysis of economists’ political influence today. By updating and extending earlier debates on the political effects of economics, the paper contributes to a renewed conceptual framework for understanding how, and under what conditions, economists continue to matter in the policy process.
Facing Fascism : French Economic Thought in the Interwar Period
Avec Nicolas Brisset et Raphaël Fèvre
In recent years, numerous works have examined the relationship between economists and fascist regimes in Europe from the 1920s to the 1940s. While the case of Italian economists has been studied in depth and exhaustively (Augello, Guidi, and Bientinesi 2020), other works have focused on the links that particular economists had with fascist thought (Brisset and Fèvre 2020). In this paper, we aim to contribute to this burgeoning literature by questioning the general way in which French economists have approached the fascist phenomenon. To do so, we will use a quantitative and computational analysis of a corpus consisting of the main economic journals of the period: the Revue d'économie politique, the Journal des économistes and X-Crise. We will first examine how French economists' treatment of fascism evolved over time. We will then propose a comparative analysis between the different journals, which correspond to different ways of doing economics: do engineers (X-Crise), academics (Revue d'économie politique) and publicists (Journal des économistes) have different points of view on fascism?
Nudges and Environmental Policy : a Historical Perspective
Avec Dorian Jullien et Alexandre Truc
This paper provides a historical perspective on the introduction of nudges as a tool of environmental public policy in France. It examines how behavioral approaches were progressively integrated into policy-making, the arguments used to legitimize their adoption, and the debates they generated within public institutions. Drawing on a series of semi-structured interviews with key actors involved in the design and implementation of nudge-based policies, the study reconstructs the stages of this policy transfer process. Particular attention is paid to the forms of resistance encountered, the institutional conditions that shaped acceptance, and the perceived effects of these instruments on environmental policy outcomes. By situating nudges within a broader historical and political context, the paper contributes to a critical understanding of behavioral policy tools and their role in contemporary environmental governance.
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