Greenspan (FT March 28, 2009) reflected that “The extraordinary risk-management discipline that developed out of the University of Chicago’s Harry Markowitz in the 1950s produced insights that won several Nobel prizes in economics. It was widely embraced not only by academics but also by a large majority of financial professionals and global regulators”.  

But Markowitz (Chicago undergraduate and post-graduate) had moved to the RAND Corporation in 1952. His dissertation topic (on the stock market) had been suggested to him by Jacob Marshak’s stock broker. In his Nobel Lecture, Markowitz (1990, 286) recalled when he defended his dissertation “Friedman argued that portfolio theory was not Economics, and that they could not award me a Ph.D. degree in Economics for a dissertation which was not in Economics.”. 
  
Prior to Markowitz, every Nobel Lecture had been published in the _American Economic Review_.  This presumption was ended when Markowitz published his Nobel Lecture in the _Journal of Finance_.  Markowitz reflected: “As to the merits of his [Friedman’s] arguments, at this point I am quite willing to concede: at the time I defended my dissertation, portfolio theory was not part of Economics. But now it is”.   

Is there any literature on this?

Robert Leeson