Top Economics Journals Research Articles

From global diffusion to local semantics: unpacking the scientization of central banks

Abstract This article investigates the scientization of central banks and analyzes the evolving knowledge production. Existing literature suggests that scientized knowledge production either becomes globally more similar over time or is driven by local political economy considerations. However, research on the structure of central bank knowledge production is lacking. To address this, I conduct semantic network analysis on 75 000 central bank working papers and articles from top economics journals. Findings show global organizational forms of knowledge production have diffused, but semantics remain localized. The semantic structure becomes increasingly clustered over time, with a notable division between the Federal Reserve System (FED) and non-FED clusters. Only Federal Reserve produces knowledge aligned with top academic journals. Cluster differences are not solely due to mandates or political contexts but depend on specific policy environments. This research illuminates the evolution of knowledge production within central banks and underscores the influence of organizational and policy contexts.

Reject or revise: Gender differences in persistence and publishing in economics

AbstractWe design an experiment to study gender differences in reactions to editorial decisions on submissions to top economics journals. Respondents read a hypothetical editor's letter where the decision (e.g., revise and resubmit) is randomized across participants. Relative to an R&R, female assistant professors who receive a rejection perceive a significantly lower likelihood of subsequently publishing the paper in any leading journal than comparable male assistant professors. We do not find this gender difference among tenured professors. We consider several mechanisms, pointing to gender differences in attribution of negative feedback to ability and confidence under time constraints as likely explanations.

Selective reporting of placebo tests in top economics journals

AbstractPlacebo tests provide incentives to underreport statistically significant tests, a form of reversed p‐hacking. We test for such underreporting in 11 top economics journals between 2009 and 2021 based on a pre‐registered analysis plan. If the null hypothesis is true in all tests, 2.5% of them should be significant at the 5% level with an effect in the same direction as the main test (and 5% in total). The actual fraction of statistically significant placebo tests with an effect in the same direction is 1.29% (95% CI [0.83, 1.63]), and the overall fraction of statistically significant placebo tests is 3.10% (95% CI [2.2, 4.0]).

Publishing Economics: How Slow? Why Slow? Is Slow Productive? How to Fix Slow?

Economics publishing proceeds much more slowly than in the natural sciences, and more slowly than in the other social sciences and finance. It is relatively even slower at the extremes. Much of the lag, especially at the extremes, arises from authors’ dilatory behavior in revisions. Additional rounds of resubmissions at top economics journals are related to additional citations; but conditional on resubmission, the delays are unrelated to greater scholarly attention. We offer several proposals for speeding publication, including no-revision policies such as Economic Inquiry’s, the use of “cascading referee reports,” limits on authors’ time revising, and limits on editors waiting for dilatory referees. (JEL A11, B29)

Teaching by Example: Evidence of Data Literacy Competencies and Practices in Top Economics Journal Articles

Objective: Data literacy is the ability to describe, evaluate, use, share, and cite data. It is increasingly important for researchers and college students, including in the field of economics. This study explores the prevalence of data literacy competencies in economics articles. Data literacy competencies displayed in journal articles demonstrate what researchers value and provide opportunities to teach students, helping librarians shape data services and instruction.Methods: Based on close reading of economics and data literacy literature, the author developed a protocol of terms relating to data literacy. A stratified random sample of 100 articles was selected from ten top economics journals. Adobe Acrobat’s index search function was used to conduct automated content analysis coding, with additional manual checking for accuracy and data sharing and sources.Results: The economics research articles in the study sample showed strong coverage of terms relating to describing, evaluating, and using data. Sharing and citing data were identified as areas for improvement as only 36% of articles shared data and 40% included terms related to citation. The analysis verifies previous research about the prevalence of commercial data use in business research and adds insight on frequently used open data sources. Conclusions: There are clear data literacy strengths within economics. Librarians have the skills to partner with economics instructors to reinforce strengths and improve gaps to prepare more data literate students.

How much should we trust R 2 and adjusted R 2: evidence from regressions in top economics journals and Monte Carlo simulations

ABSTRACT R2 and adjusted R2 may exaggerate a model’s true ability to predict the dependent variable in the presence of overfitting, whereas leave-one-out R2 (LOOR2) is robust to overfitting. We demonstrate this by replicating 279 regressions from 100 papers in top economics journals, where the median increases of R2 and adjusted R2 over LOOR2 reach 40.2% and 21.4% respectively. The inflation of test errors over training errors increases with the severity of overfitting as measured by the number of regressors and nonlinear terms, and the presence of outliers, but decreases with the sample size. These results are further validated by Monte Carlo simulations.

Biased Trade Narratives and Its Influence on Development Studies: A Multi-level Mixed-Method Approach.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41287-023-00583-z.

Home Bias in Top Economics Journals

Home Bias in Top Economics Journals

Selective Reporting of Placebo Tests in Top Economics Journals

Selective Reporting of Placebo Tests in Top Economics Journals

The Social Field of Elite Trade Economists: A Quantitative Social Studies of Economics Perspective

The evolving research field of social studies of economics (SSE) has shown that economics as a profession has gained influence on public debate and political power in many countries and in different social contexts. The channels of influence for economists are complex and widespread, i.e., there are multiple channels through which economists are able to influence public policy issues. In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of a sample of the 85 most published authors of trade-related research in top economics journals to characterize the social field of elite economists and show how position in that field correlates with influence and power in and outside academia. More specifically, our data include information on their academic careers, their professional social networks, and their involvement in a variety of possible intermediaries between academic economics and policymaking (e.g., institutions such as think tanks or the media). We apply multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis to show how different configurations of intra-academic capital are associated to policy-relevant extra-academic capital. The overall results of this analysis are threefold. First, the biographical analysis of elite trade economists reveals a remarkable degree of concentration of different forms of capital, which indicates a strong hierarchical order within the elite segment of trade economists. Second, and in line with this, despite the overall unequal distribution of capital within this elite sample, different forms of intra-academic and extra-academic capitals become visible. Third, while the cluster analysis reveals a main “average core” of (trade-)policy-oriented economists, the group of economists with very high capital is separated into two smaller clusters: The “ivory elite” cluster consists mainly of academic capital variables, while the “public econs” cluster is also composed of non-academic variables from the policy and media channels. So, even among elite trade economists, it is only as small number, who really is successfully gaining political and societal impact.

The authors of economics journals revisited: evidence from a large-scale replication of Hodgson and Rothman (1999)

AbstractIn this paper, we present results from of a large-scale replication of Hodgson and Rothman's (1999, The Economic Journal, 109(453): 165–186) seminal analysis of the institutional and geographical concentration of authors publishing in top economic journals. We analyze bibliometric data of more than 49,000 articles published in a set of 30 highly influential economic journals between 1990 and 2018. Based on a random sample of 3,253 authors, we further analyze the PhD-granting institutions of the authors under study to better scrutinize the claim of an ‘institutional oligopoly’. The findings confirm the long-term persistence of strong oligopolistic structures in terms of both, author affiliations as well as PhD-granting institutions.

The Construct of Surprise. A Review

While the construct of surprise has increasingly been used in recent years, its proliferation across the social sciences has led to different words and meanings for the same construct that create confusion and a distinct lack of construct clarity. In addition, organizations are increasingly subjected to surprises that draw executive attention, additional resources, and organizational energy. In our review of the construct, the author searched the top journals in Management, Economics, Psychology, Sociology, and Political Science and found that three prominent perspectives emerge. The author, therefore, provides a concise overview of the construct and its key concepts and provides guidance about promising avenues for future research.

Jacob Mincer Award

Previous articleNext article FreeJacob Mincer AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLawrence F. Katz is the 2022 recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics. Katz graduated from Berkeley in 1981 and earned his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He returned to Berkeley as an assistant professor and joined the economics faculty of Harvard University after one year, where he is currently the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics. He is a Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) fellow (elected 2005), a past SOLE president (2013–14), a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). Katz was chief economist of the US Department of Labor and has served on the advisory boards of several important institutions.Katz’s most influential research studies the evolution of wage inequality in advanced countries. He focuses on the fundamental role of technological change and education. His 1992 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper with Murphy developed the “canonical framework,” a simple model expressing the educational wage premium as reflecting observable shifts in educational supply and a residual technical change term. He found that although increases in the supply of skilled workers reduce inequality, technology often favors more skilled workers, increasing inequality. With Autor and Krueger, he found that increases in observable technology indicators, such as computer usage and R&D, increase skill demand, further bolstering the skill-biased technological change hypothesis. Researchers have adopted these methods to analyze changing inequality in many countries.His authoritative book with Claudia Goldin, The Race between Education and Technology (2008), examines how the growth of educational institutions contained inequality for most of the twentieth century. The slowdown in educational attainment for cohorts entering the labor market after roughly 1980 increased the return to schooling in the last quarter of the century.With Autor and Kearney (American Economic Review, 2006; Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008), Katz argues for a more nuanced role of technology. Digital technologies tend to replace routine tasks performed by occupations in the middle of the wage distribution, where wages and employment fell noticeably from the 1990s, compared with both the top and the bottom of the earnings distribution. European studies replicate this “hollowing out” of “middle jobs.” His recent work shows that the growth of large “superstar firms” with low labor shares and high profit margins explains the decline in labor’s share of gross domestic product (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020). Again, he links this to changes in the fundamental nature of technologies.Other work demonstrates the importance of place. With Kling and Liebman (Econometrica, 2007; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001), he demonstrated that although changing neighborhoods did not raise adults’ earnings, it substantially improved their mental health. With Chetty and Hendren (American Economic Review, 2016), he found that better neighborhoods helped the future labor market outcomes of younger children.In sum, Lawrence Katz is an extraordinarily productive scholar who has changed the face of social science. His work is marked by an intense empirical seriousness and a strong focus on policy. His research seeks to change the world, not just to interpret it.Beyond his research contributions, Katz has provided distinguished service to the profession as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics for the past 30 years. Under his leadership, it has become the most widely cited economics journal. His success in reducing review times at that publication has set the standard for other top journals in economics. He is renowned for his generous mentorship of junior scholars and his decency and respect in dealing with other economists. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 40, Number 3July 2022 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721002 Views: 571Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Racial Isolation and Marginalization of Economic Research on Race and Crime

This essay examines the extent to which research on the economics of race and crime produced by Black economists or published in the flagship journal of the organization of Black economists, the Review of Black Political Economy (RBPE), is undervalued by mainstream economics. We use modern bibliometric methods to test for citation biases in the economics of crime literature. We also identify the contributions of three streams of research overlooked in the mainstream literature: identity, police use of force, and mass incarceration. We find evidence that Blacks publishing on race and crime in top economics journals are less likely to be cited than non-Blacks and that articles published in the RBPE are less likely to be cited than articles published in other journals. A review of some under-cited articles reveals that themes related to identity, police use of force, and mass incarceration hold valuable insights for policy makers and those seeking solutions to problems of persistent racial disparities in the criminal legal system. (JEL A11, A14, H75, J15, K42)

Publishing While Female: are Women Held to Higher Standards? Evidence from Peer Review

Abstract Female authors are under-represented in top economics journals. In this paper, I investigate whether higher writing standards contribute to the problem. I find that (i) female-authored papers are 1%–6% better written than equivalent papers by men; (ii) the gap widens during peer review; (iii) women improve their writing as they publish more papers (but men do not); (iv) female-authored papers take longer under review. Using a subjective expected utility framework, I argue that higher writing standards for women are consistent with these stylised facts. A counterfactual analysis suggests that senior female economists may, as a result, write at least 5% more clearly than they otherwise would. As a final exercise, I show tentative evidence that women adapt to biased treatment in ways that may disguise it as voluntary choice.

Predicting the impact of American Economic Review articles by author characteristics

Abstract Authors who publish in American Economic Review (AER) have career paths confined to a few prestigious institutions, and they mostly have exceptional past publication performance. In this paper, I show that authors who are educated and work in the top 10 institutions and have better past publication performance receive more citations for their current AER publications. Authors who have published in the top economic theory journals receive fewer citations even after controlling for the subfield of their AER article. The gender of the authors, years of post-PhD experience, and the location of the affiliated institution do not have any significant effect on the citation performance. An opportunistic editor can exploit the factors that are related to citation performance to substantially improve the citation performance of the journal. Such opportunistic behavior increases the overrepresentation of authors with certain characteristics. For example, an opportunistic editor who uses the predicted citation performance of articles to select a quarter of the articles increases the ratio of authors who works at the top 10 institutions from 30.8% to 52.0%.

The triple difference estimator

Summary Triple difference has become a widely used estimator in empirical work. A close reading of articles in top economics journals reveals that the use of the estimator to a large extent rests on intuition. The identifying assumptions are neither formally derived nor generally agreed on. We give a complete presentation of the triple difference estimator, and show that even though the estimator can be computed as the difference between two difference-in-differences estimators, it does not require two parallel trend assumptions to have a causal interpretation. The reason is that the difference between two biased difference-in-differences estimators will be unbiased as long as the bias is the same in both estimators. This requires only one parallel trend assumption to hold.

The power of public choice in law and economics

AbstractIn this paper I discuss how Law and Economics can benefit from incorporating some insights from Public Choice into their analyses. Within this argument, I examine the evolution of experimental methods by looking at laboratory, field, and natural experiments; and conducting a very simple scientometrics analysis on the relative frequency of experimental studies in journals such asPublic Choice, European Journal of Political Economy, Constitutional Political Economy, Journal of Law and Economics, andJournal of Law, Economics and Organizationcompared with top economics journals such asAmerican Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, orReview of Economic Studies. I also refer to the connectivity of Behavioral Law and Economics and Behavioral Public Choice. The paper then finishes with a discussion of a selected number of topics covering areas such as corruption, tax compliance, shitstorms/firestorms, constitutional choices, globalization, and international organizations; all of which present scientific challenges when applying pure Law and Economics approaches without also implementing a Public Choice analysis.

Have ‘mainstream’ economics journals ‘missed the bus’ on wetland, marine and coastal ecosystems?

We assess research published in Scopus-indexed journals from 1981 on the economics of wetlands, marine and coastal ecosystems. We used scientometric techniques to extract records of all journal articles with the keyword economics, in combination with wetland, marine or coastal ecosystems in their titles, abstracts or keywords. We compared this with publications in the top 10 journals in economics in the Scimago database. We found that these top economics journals have ignored this topic and, thus, ‘missed the bus’ on an important economic resource. They published only eight articles with these word combinations in their entire history, even though these ecosystems contribute significantly to human wellbeing. However, new journals that have been more inclusive of these themes in ecological and environmental economics have emerged. Our study adds to the literature on wetland, marine and coastal ecosystems by providing a systematic study of publications in Scopus-indexed journals on this theme. Whereas a number of studies have reviewed the literature with the objective of documenting methodological advances, our study complements them by looking at the spatial and temporal spread of the contributors. We also provide an insight on which journals are most frequently publishing research in this thematic area.

Which Have Been the Most Research-Productive Finance Departments in the Past Twenty Years?

In this paper, we provide a global ranking of finance departments in business schools for the past 20 years and the past decade. The ranking is the first of its kind in many respects – it includes publications in the top 6 finance journals (by 2021 impact factor) as well as a host of top journals in Economics and Accounting. The rankings provide a per-capita sort where we compute the ratio of total publications by the number of finance faculty in the department. The rankings use a “manipulable” database that allows the user to change the time-period, chosen journals and whether to sort rankings on per-capita or gross output.