Abstract
We identify two polar life cycles of scholarly creativity among Nobel laureate economists with Tinbergen falling broadly in the middle. Experimental innovators work inductively, accumulating knowledge from experience. Conceptual innovators work deductively, applying abstract principles. Innovators whose work is more conceptual do their most important work earlier in their careers than those whose work is more experimental. Our estimates imply that the probability that the most conceptual laureate publishes his single best work peaks at age 25 compared to the mid-50 s for the most experimental laureate. Thus, while experience benefits experimental innovators, newness to a field benefits conceptual innovators.
Highlights
Many scholars believe that creativity is the particular domain of the young
There is a systematic relationship between age and scholarly creativity, but it is more complex than the typical view or that in the existing literature
Viewing life cycle creativity as an individual and not a disciplinary phenomenon suggests that there may be systematic changes over time in the mean age of peak creativity within disciplines as the relative numbers of the types of innovators change in response to contributions made in those disciplines
Summary
Research on the careers of modern painters, poets, novelists, and natural scientists has revealed that there have been two polar types of innovators in each of these activities (Galenson 2001, 2006; Galenson and Pope 2013). The goals of important experimental innovators are ambitious but vague, as they seek to present perceptions that are less precise The imprecision of their goals leads them to work tentatively, by a process of trial and error. Conceptual economists pose precise problems and solve them deductively They may do this throughout their careers, but their most general—and most important—innovations tend to come early in their careers, when they are more likely to challenge basic tenets of the discipline that are widely treated as rules by more experienced scholars. Pose broader questions, which they solve inductively by accumulating evidence that serves as the basis for new generalizations The more evidence they can analyze, the more powerful their generalizations, so the most important experimental innovations are often the product of long periods of research. We are not aware of evidence that receiving a Nobel Prize increases citations to work from particular ages, nor are we aware of reasons that additional citations would be to the late works of experimental laureates or to the early works of conceptual laureates
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