LibGuides: Economists' Papers Archive: Getting Started

New Collections

Barbara Bergmann
Barbara Bergmann (1927-2015) was a feminist economist known for her provocative and interdisciplinary scholarship. She researched the causes of economic hardship through direct empirical observation and extensive data-gathering. She wrote extensively and in a highly accessible style, influencing thinkers across the social sciences. She felt that government has an important role in fighting child poverty, institutionalized racism, and what she called the “sex-role caste system.” Bergmann was also an early adopter of computer simulations to predict economic interactions, and a co-founder of the International Association for Feminist Economics.
Edward Prescott
Prescott is a Nobel-prize winning economist, Professor at Arizona State University, and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The collection contains drafts and published copies of Prescott's research papers and other writings, professional correspondence, files from speaking engagements and presentations, and teaching materials from his career at Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Minnesota, and Arizona State University.

Overview of the Collections

An annotated list of the collections in the Archive of Economic Thought is located here.

Duke’s collections contain a wealth of economic research materials, including resources on game theory, public policy, growth theory, and many other areas. The sizes of the collections vary from very small collections of a few folders to hundreds of linear feet of material. Each of the collections has distinctive research value. Some contain all professional correspondence as well as the notes, drafts, and manuscripts of major works. Others contain information on political involvement, records of professional involvement (e.g., editorial boards, conference participation, etc.), and personal biographical material. Most of the collections are from economists working in America but include large aggregations of research material on areas worldwide.

In addition to the papers of individual economists, the library also holds the records of several organizations and journals important for the history of economic thought. Chief among them are the records of the American Economic Association, founded in 1885. This collection consists of more than 350 linear feet of materials and includes the records (correspondence and referee files, accepted articles, papers and proceedings) of the American Economic Review. The library is actively acquiring new collections as well as organizing and cataloging existing collections.

For further information on the history of the collections, see the article “Archiving the History of Economics” by E. Roy Weintraub et al. in the Journal of Economic Literature 36.3 (September 1998), pp. 1496-1501 (link functional for Duke users only).