Empirical Evidence of Innovation in Economic Theory: Scientific Interaction and knowledge diffusion at the Santa Fe Institute

onomic theory, this paper addresses the issue by investigating its sociological, intellectual and narrative dimensions. The birth and development of the Complexity approach to economics at the Santa Fe Institute are taken as a case study. We conduct statistical analyses of a novel database of working papers issued by the Santa Fe Institute over a fifteen-year period (1989–2004). Data validate our historical reconstruction by providing information about publication practices, scientific interaction, diffusion of ideas, and research themes. We also estimate a knowledge diffusion function where publication delays and the lack of publication of working papers are jointly explained. The explanatory variables relate to the external evaluation andintellectual content ofthe papers andtotheauthors’ characteristics andpublishing behaviour. Among other results, we find that the use of innovative concepts reduces publication lags. We conclude that while the sociological, intellectual and narrative dimensions of change may dovetail in the ‘hard sciences’, the dynamics of change in Complexity Economics tend to be messier, exhibiting different paces and modalities caused by the non-trivial interaction of its dimensions.