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on Sociology of Economics |
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Issue of 2013‒01‒07
four papers chosen by Jonas Holmström Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration |
| By: | Clément Bosquet (London School of Economics and Political Science (Spatial Economic Research Center), and Aix-Marseille University (Aix-Marseille School of Economics), CNRS, & EHESS.); Pierre-Philippe Combes (Aix-Marseille University (Aix-Marseille School of Economics), CNRS & EHESS.); |
| Abstract: | Thanks to a unique individual dataset of French academics in economics, we explain individual publication and citation records by gender and age, coauthorship patterns (average number of authors per article and size of the co-author network) and specialisation choices (percentage of output in each JEL code). The analysis is performed on both EconLit publication scores (adjusted for journal quality) and Google Scholar citation indexes, which allows us to present a broad picture of knowledge diffusion in economics. Citations are largely driven by publication records but also substantially increased by larger research team size and co-author networks. |
| Keywords: | economics of science, productivity determinants, knowledge diffusion, publication scores, citation indexes |
| JEL: | J24 O31 J45 |
| Date: | 2012–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aim:wpaimx:1236&r=sog |
| By: | Saint-Paul, Gilles |
| Abstract: | When policymakers and private agents use models, the economists who design the model have an incentive to alter it in order influence outcomes in a fashion consistent with their own preferences. I discuss some consequences of the existence of such ideological bias. In particular, I analyze the role of measurement infrastructures such as national statistical institutes, the extent to which intellectual competition between different schools of thought may lead to polarization of views over some parameters and at the same time to consensus over other parameters, and finally how the attempt to preserve influence can lead to degenerative research programs. |
| Keywords: | Autocoherent models; Degenerative research programs; Identification; Ideology; Intellectual competition; Macroeconomic modelling; Polarization; Self-confirming equilibria |
| JEL: | A11 E6 |
| Date: | 2012–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9263&r=sog |
| By: | David Card; Stefano DellaVigna |
| Abstract: | Academic journals set a variety of policies that affect the supply of new manuscripts. We study the impact of page limit policies adopted by the American Economic Review (AER) in 2008 and the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA) in 2009 in response to a substantial increase in the length of articles in economics. We focus the analysis on the decision by potential authors to either shorten a longer manuscript in response to the page limit, or submit to another journal. For the AER we find little indication of a loss of longer papers – instead, authors responded by shortening the text and reformatting their papers. For JEEA, in contrast, we estimate that the page length policy led to nearly complete loss of longer manuscripts. These findings provide a revealed-preference measure of competition between journals and indicate that a top-5 journal has substantial monopoly power over submissions, unlike a journal one notch below. At both journals we find that longer papers were more likely to receive a revise and resubmit verdict prior to page limits, suggesting that the loss of longer papers may have had a detrimental effect on quality at JEEA. Despite a modest impact of the AER's policy on the average length of submissions (-5%), the policy had little or no effect on the length of final accepted manuscripts. Our results highlight the importance of evaluating editorial policies. |
| JEL: | A1 |
| Date: | 2012–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18663&r=sog |
| By: | Daniel S. Hamermesh |
| Abstract: | Presenting data on all full-length articles published in the three top general economics journals for one year in each of the 1960s through 2010s, I analyze how patterns of co-authorship, age structure and methodology have changed, and what the possible causes of these changes may have been. The entire distribution of number of authors has shifted steadily rightward. In the last two decades the fraction of older authors has almost quadrupled. The top journals are now publishing many fewer papers that represent pure theory, regardless of sub-field, somewhat less empirical work based on publicly available data sets, and many more empirical studies based on data assembled for the study by the author(s) or on laboratory or field experiments. |
| JEL: | B20 J24 |
| Date: | 2012–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18635&r=sog |