Professor Joel Mokyr, of the Department of Economics, was named a 2021 Citation Laureate™, for his studies of the history and culture of technological progress and its economic consequences.
Each year since 2002, analysts from the Institute for Scientific Information™ have drawn on Web of Science™ publications and citation data to identify influential researchers whose contributions to science have been extremely influential or transformative. The analysts examine the research areas of physiology or medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics to identify those individuals whose research publications are highly cited.
As such, Mokyr is one of 16 researchers from around the globe whose work has been deemed to be ‘of Nobel class.’ Mokyr’s research focuses on the economic history of Europe, with a specialization in the period of 1750–1914. His latest book, “A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy,” questions the factors that made the Industrial Revolution possible and how culture was a deciding factor in these societal transformations.
Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor in the department of economics at Weinberg College and co-director of Northwestern’s Center for Economic History at Northwestern. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society, as well as the British Academy, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei, and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the president of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the “Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History” and a co-editor of the “Journal of Economic History.” He was also the 2006 winner of the biennial Heineken Award for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history.
Read more about Mokyr in Northwestern Now. View the list of 2021 Citation laureates here.