The association was founded as the Catholic Economic Association (CEA) by American Jesuits Thomas Divine and Bernard William Dempsey (1903–1960), who received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1940, and was a student of Joseph A. Schumpeter.
Divine published "Interest, an historical and analytical study in economics and modern ethics" in 1959.
The first president was Thomas Divine and the first vice-president was Edward Chamberlin from Harvard University, mostly known for his work on monopolistic competition and on Chamberlinian monopolistic competition in particular.
The CEA was renamed the Association for Social Economics in 1970 in order to enrich the association's scope on ethics and social justice in economics with a more universal audience.
You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.This article about an economics organization is a stub.