In 1968, a pension fund in Boston, Massachusetts, asked a young securities analyst, Alice Tepper Marlin, to compile a 'Peace Portfolio' of corporations with the least involvement in supplying the war in Vietnam. Tepper Marlin found that such information was not readily available, even from the corporations themselves. When her report was completed, more than 600 other church and community groups around the United States asked for the information. Six months later, Tepper Marlin founded the Council on Economic Priorities. She is still its President and Executive Director.

CEP is an independent public service organisation, the leading one of its kind in the US, dedicated to the analysis of some of the major issues confronting society. CEP's research has been concentrated in three areas: national security, energy and the environment, and corporate responsibility. Research on corporate responsibility has addressed subjects such as ethical investment, the effects of political action committees, fair employment and consumer issues.

In conjunction with its work on these topics, CEP has published scores of major studies, in addition to newsletters and other research. Tepper Marlin has herself edited numerous books emerging from the programme. One of the areas of CEP activity with the highest public profile has been in the area of corporate social responsibility, following its study Rating America's Corporate Conscience (1986). Then came its consumer guide, Shopping for a Better World, which became a best-seller and resulted in articles in over a thousand newspapers.

CEP followed up this huge public interest with other initiatives: an Environmental Data Clearinghouse, a further book on ethical investment, and a study of the community impacts of corporate mergers. The success of Shopping for a Better World also boosted CEP's 'Letters to the Editor' project, in which participants were encouraged to write to their local papers giving a local slant to some aspect of CEP-covered issues. The Council launched its annual Corporate Conscience Awards, giving recognition to those companies with the best records in terms of corporate responsibility and shaming those at the other end of the scale with 'dishonourable mentions’.

In his introduction to the 1990 Corporate Conscience Awards, the well-known journalist Bill Moyers said: "[This organisation] has become such a powerful social and moral force in the land... [CEP] has been in the forefront of serious, substantial and irrefutable research and powerful and morally significant education on corporate responsibility."