Forging Modern Labour Economics

Labour economics is often taken by vivid discussions about the specificity of the labour market and the need to develop a different approach, away from the current standard microeconomics. What is often forgotten is that this was not always the case. Labour research in the interwar years was quite different from what we regard presently as labour economics, being much more broadly and loosely defined as labour problems and labour issues and having much more fragile links with the economic discipline, both theoretically and institutionally. This situation was transformed in the aftermath of the WWII, with a redefinition of labour economics research and the progressive curtailment of the apparent isolation that labour research had experienced from its economic foundations. This increasing closeness with economics, meaning neoclassical economics, was certainly related with the emergence of a new generation of labour (economists) researchers that included those that would dominate the field for the following two decades.