I am a historian of economics. Here is my CV You can find almost all I’ve written on my SSRN page, though I’m in the process of moving my preprints to my SocArXiv page. I am a CNRS researcher, affiliated with CREST, and an associate professor at Ecole Polytechnique (where I teach controversies in the history of 20th century economics, the history of applied economics, and the history of economists facing nature). I sometimes blog on this website. I tweet @undercoverhist.
My dissertation was a inquiry into the consistency of economists’ science and politics, carried through a comparative analysis of the life and work of Gunnar Myrdal (paper), Milton Friedman (published paper // final draft) and Jacob Marschak (published paper // ungated ).
My overarching research agenda is to understand the perceived rise of applied economics since the 1970s. Roger Backhouse and I have coordinated a History of Political Economy special issue on the topic ( here is our introductory chapter). To understand this transformation, we have researched how the rise of computers altered economists’ practices. I have also reconstructed the history of the JEL codes to document how the mental map with which economists navigate their discipline came to embody the core/applied structure of economics. With Andrej Svorenčík, I have tracked changes in the postwar intellectual and prestige structure of economics through the history of the John Bates Clark medal, and how workshops and seminars have fueled or challenged intellectual and institutional hierarchies in economics with Aurélien Saidi. More recently, I have argued that economists’ modeling practices have been shaped by a longstanding tension between writing realistic and writing tractable models (open access pub).
A large part of my agenda is to use all these ideas on applied work, computation, tractability, hierarchies and more to write the history of various applied fields (a project I initiated thanks to an INET grant). “Economic fields” largely define economists’ identity, or the structure of specific economic literature, but there are still hardly historicized. My case studies include the rise (and fall?) of urban economics in the wake of the 1960s urban upheaval (with Anthony Rebours, draft here), the transformation of Musgrave’s public finance into modern public economics (in progress), the transformation of environmental economics as applied welfare and how differently generalist vs specialized economists have framed nature since the 1960s (in progress), how market design was shaped by computational constraints and affordances (in progress), how collective decision became a fringe topic in economics (pub // draft, joint with Jean-Baptiste Fleury), and the history of macroeconomic theory (paper with Aurélien Saïdi) and macroeconometric modeling (draft // paper with Roger Backhouse).
Macroeconomics, which I approach foremost as an applied endeavour, is a challenging playground, one in need of richer narratives. I researched the development of heterogeneous agent models in macroeconomics since the 1970 with Pedro Duarte and Aurélien Saidi (published paper), as well as the development of software in macro with the later and Francesco Sergi (contact me for paper on Dynare). I am also interested in how economic analysis is nurtured and applied within central banks. I have worked on the development of the FRB macroeconomics model at the Fed with Juan Acosta ( draft // published), and I have investigated the status and place of economic research at the Bank of England with François Claveau, Clement Fontan, Aurélien Goutsmedt and Francesco Sergi (this project was funded by an ERC/Rebuilding Macroeconomics grant. Paper is here)
Economists’ applied identity is often embedded in specific places. I have thus examined the development of economics at MIT (paper // draft), the relationships between economics, engineering at the University of Stanford (with Aurélien Saïdi, draft // published paper). I’m now working on the various species of applied economics developed at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s and 1980s.
A final (but central) line of research fueled by my focus on the rise of applied economics has been to study whether those transformations have shifted the status and representation of women in economics : with John Singleton and Cleo Chassonery-Zaïgouche, I have written a history of the CSWEP. I’ve also written on how an economists as central to economics’ identity as Paul Samuelson have approached gender discrimination, both in the economy as a topic of study, and in his professional entourage (draft // paper). I’m currently interested in how credit dynamics and the changing status of computer-associated work have contributed to make women economists invisible. For the moment, my attempts are focused on writing, not so much on women economists, but on the absence of women in some part of the history of economics.
Contact: beatrice.cherrier (at) gmail.com
The Undercover Historian 
This was a lovely bllog post