|
on Sociology of Economics |
| By: | Ricardo Dahis |
| Abstract: | This paper documents new facts about concentration in publishing in economics. First, the profession grows downward . The number of economists grew almost sixfold since 1990, but new entrants publish in lower-tier journals while incumbents hold the top. Second, there is high and persistent concentration at the top. Along with the downward growth, the top-1% authors accounted for 38.4% of top-5 publication credit in 1990 and for 78.3% in 2025. Third, the persistence is widespread within cohorts, within subfields, and within gender. Fourth, new journals only slightly dilute concentration. Fifth, elite authors diversify on topics faster than the rest of the profession. We interpret the findings with a screening model of attention under information overload. The evidence is consistent with the model: as the field grows, citations concentrate on established work and the conditional citation premium of top-author papers narrows. |
| Keywords: | economics of science, publishing, concentration, entry, coauthorship, scientometrics |
| JEL: | A11 A14 I23 J24 O33 |
| Date: | 2026–06–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mos:moswps:paper_1781831602928_319 |
| By: | Nattavudh Powdthavee |
| Abstract: | Many universities in middle-income countries lack the peer-review infrastructure to assess research quality directly and instead tie financial rewards to publication in journals classified as Q1 under the SCImago Journal Rank system. By converting continuously varying journal quality into discrete institutional categories, these systems create sharp incentive discontinuities at quartile boundaries. In a preregistered study, we apply a bunching estimator — a method from public finance that detects excess concentration of observations around institutionally salient thresholds — to 149, 402 Scopus-indexed publications from Thailand over 2016–2025, exploiting Thailand's 2019 higher-education reform as a source of temporal variation. We find no significant bunching before 2019 but substantial excess concentration immediately above the Q1 boundary afterwards — a pattern not observed in Singapore, whose publication environment is not organised around explicit quartile-based financial rewards. The post-reform excess mass corresponds to roughly 1, 575 additional publications over 2020–2025, implying an estimated 39 million THB (approximately US$1.1 million) in cumulative institutional expenditure. These findings indicate that discrete quartile-based reward systems redirect research effort towards threshold optimisation rather than research quality, and that replacing binary quartile rewards with continuous percentile-based incentives would better align institutional evaluation with scientific output. |
| Keywords: | Bunching estimation; Publication metrics; Journal quartile thresholds; Higher education reform; Goodhart’s law |
| JEL: | I23 O38 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pui:dpaper:256 |
| By: | Pierre Azoulay; Raffaella Sadun; Daniela Scur |
| Abstract: | Shortly after major policy changes to US science funding began in early 2025, we surveyed 916 young biomedical scientists – PhD students and postdoctoral researchers – about their career intentions and expectations. The results document a dramatic shift in sentiment. Barely half of respondents now say they are likely to remain in academia, down 22 percentage points from how they felt six months earlier. The fraction likely to stay in the United States fell by 21 percentage points. Even satisfaction with having pursued a PhD in science declined by 16 percentage points. These are not the complaints of established scientists defending their budgets, but rather the stated intentions of the next generation – the scientists who would, in ordinary times, become the principal investigators of the future. |
| JEL: | I23 O32 O38 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35330 |