Berkeley Economic History Lab

The Berkeley Economic History Laboratory, headed by Barry Eichengreen of University of California Berkeley, was awarded a grant by the Institute for New Economic Thinking to ramp up the production of historically literate economists capable of contributing to the policy debate.

The grant seeks to expand the supply of economic historians doing policy-relevant research, by doubling or tripling the annual output of Berkeley PhDs specializing in economic history. The grant offers fellowships to attract additional candidates to the field, expands seminar budgets to allow for additional presentation and discussion of work in progress, and provides grants for exploratory archival visits and digitization of historical data.

The larger purpose of the grant is to produce change in the field of economics by making it a more fundamentally historical, institutional, and empirical social science.