Economics: Research Guide

Scientific publishing has become a complex economic engine intertwined with prestige and power. While publicly funded research fuels prestigious journals owned by private entities, the success of scientists and institutions becomes intimately tied to a cycle of increasing publication costs and limited access. The initial section of this article employs a satirical analogy, drawing parallels between the scientific publishing industry and the familiar framework of social media platforms. It offers a succinct historical overview, elucidating the progression of the present publishing structure. The final section delves into the paradoxical realities of this system. (1) Nation-funded research, pu..

In 2020 and 2021, the world witnessed policies that caused enormous net damage to most countries. We demonstrate the usefulness of the new WELLBY currency in gauging the costs and benefits of COVID policies and review the contributions of Australian economists to the scholarly and public debates about these policies. Our analysis documents the value of what was destroyed, the weak resistance mounted by the Australian economics profession during this period, and the role played by many Australian economists as apologists for what we view as Australia's most catastrophic peacetime economic policy failure. We close with ideas for working towards a better future.

The high relevance of top-notch academic journals turns them into 'must stock' products that assign its often commercial owners with extraordinary market power. Intended to tackle this, university consortia around the globe negotiate so-called 'transformative agreements' with many publishing houses. It shall pave the way towards standard open-access publishing. While several contract designs exist, the 'publish-and-read' (PAR) scheme is the one that comes closest to the ideal of an entirely open access environment: Publishers are paid a fixed case-by-case rate for each publication, which includes a fee for their extensive libraries. In turn, all subscription payments are waived. I theoretica..

This paper studies the relationship between the creative abilities of study peers and academic achievement. We conduct a novel large scale field experiment at university, where students are randomized into work groups based on their score on a creativity test prior to university entry. We first show that the creative abilities of peers matter for a student's academic achievement. A one standard deviation higher creativity peer group improves study performance by 8.4 to 10 percentage points. Notably, this effect is driven by the average group creativity, there is no special impact of creative superstars. Further analysis suggests that students exposed to creative peers become more creative, b..

For around twenty years, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) have been considered the gold standard of causal attribution and have gradually acquired a dominant position in the method of administering proof in the field of development. This domination, supported by a powerful pro-RCT movement, was crowned by the obtention of various positions of power and the awarding of numerous distinctions, including the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 to three of its tutelary figures, praised for their contribution to the fight against poverty. Since then, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world as the biggest global poverty shock in decades. This article questions the role played by RCTs in the policies im..

We make the case for a cultural shift towards open science in academic marketing research to address growing concerns about research complexity and challenges surrounding replicability and reproducibility. We discuss how open science can increase the scientific rigor and credibility of research across diverse paradigms and practices within the field. We also provide guidance on implementing open science in empirical research for authors, journals, and institutions, highlighting the benefits and costs of adapting existing practices to the field’s subdisciplines. Implementing open science practices requires concerted and collaborative efforts among authors, journals, and institutions to inte..

The study of gender was far from mainstream in economics when Claudia Goldin began her research on women and work in the 1980s. Barbara Petrongolo discusses the impact of the 2023 economics Nobel laureate in shaping today's research frontier on gender inequalities - from public policy to the stereotypes and social norms that have such a powerful influence on women's participation in the labour market.

Economists have played a powerful role in shaping modern Australia. Drawing on my experience as an academic economist and an economic policymaker, I outline ten principles to guide economists seeking to maximise their impact. These are to (1) Focus on wellbeing, not just dollars; (2) Think comparative advantage; (3) Ignore sunk costs; (4) Optimise, subject to constraints; (5) Use the best evidence; (6) Consider expected value; (7) Think in magnitudes, not just in signs; (8) Channel a libertarian; (9) Remember equity; and (10) Incentives matter.

We study how delays in NIH grant funding affect the career outcomes of research personnel. Using comprehensive earnings and tax records linked to university transaction data along with a difference-in-differences design, we find that a funding interruption of more than 30 days has a substantial effect on job placements for personnel who work in labs with a single NIH R01 research grant, including a 3 percentage point (40%) increase in the probability of not working in the US. Incorporating information from the full 2020 Decennial Census and data on publications, we find that about half of those induced into nonemployment appear to permanently leave the US and are 90% less likely to publish i..

We study the presence and the extent of gender differences in reference letters for graduate students in economics and finance, and how these differences relate to early labor market outcomes. To these ends, we build a novel rich dataset and combine Natural Language Processing techniques with standard regression analysis. We find that men are described more often as brilliant and women as hardworking and diligent. We show that the former (latter) description relates positively (negatively) with various subsequent career outcomes. We provide evidence that the observed differences in the way candidates are described are driven by implicit gender stereotypes.

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a widely used metric for ranking journals based on the number of citations garnered by papers published over a specific timeframe. To assess the accuracy of JIF values, I compared citation counts for 20 of my own publications across six major bibliography databases: CrossRef, Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus, PubMed, and Publishing journal records. The analysis revealed noteworthy variations in citation counts, ranging from 10% to over 50% between the lowest and highest citation counts. Google Scholar records the highest citation numbers, while PubMed reported the lowest. Notably, Web of Science, whose citation data are used in JIF calculations, tend ..

Heidi Hartmann, founder of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, talks about the concept of “comparable worth” and what attracted her to the field of economics.

Artificial-intelligence tools in research like ChatGPT are playing an increasingly transformative role in revolutionizing scientific publishing and re-shaping its economic background. They can help academics to tackle such issues as limited space in academic journals, accessibility of knowledge, delayed dissemination, or the exponential growth of academic output. Moreover, AI tools could potentially change scientific communication and academic publishing market as we know them. They can help to promote Open Access (OA) in the form of preprints, dethrone the entrenched journals and publishers, as well as introduce novel approaches to the assessment of research output. It is also imperative th..

What is the optimal order in which a researcher should submit their papers to journals of differing quality? I analyze a sequential search model without recall where the researcher's expected value from journal submission depends on the history of past submissions. Acceptances immediately terminate the search process and deliver some payoff, while rejections carry information about the paper's quality, affecting the researcher's belief in acceptance probability over future journals. When journal feedback does not change the paper's quality, the researcher's optimal strategy is monotone in their acceptance payoff. Submission costs distort the researcher's effective acceptance payoff, but main..

Pre-registration is regarded as an important contributor to research credibility. We investigate this by analyzing the pattern of test statistics from the universe of randomized controlled trials (RCT) studies published in 15 leading economics journals. We draw two conclusions: (a) Pre-registration frequently does not involve a pre-analysis plan (PAP), or sufficient detail to constrain meaningfully the actions and decisions of researchers after data is collected. Consistent with this, we find no evidence that pre-registration in itself reduces p-hacking and publication bias. (b) When pre-registration is accompanied by a PAP we find evidence consistent with both reduced phacking and publicati..

This article reviews and summarizes current reproduction and replication practices in political science. We first provide definitions for reproducibility and replicability. We then review data availability policies for 28 leading political science journals and present the results from a survey of editors about their willingness to publish comments and replications. We discuss new initiatives that seek to promote and generate highquality reproductions and replications. Finally, we make the case for standards and practices that may help increase data availability, reproducibility, and replicability in political science.

Differences in annual publication counts may reflect the dynamic of scientific progress. Declining annual numbers of publications may be interpreted as missing progress in field-specific knowledge. In this paper, we present empirical results on dynamics of progress in economic fields (defined by JEL codes) based on a methodological approach introduced by Bornmann and Haunschild (2022). We focused on publications that have been published between 2012 and 2021 and identified those fields in economics with the highest dynamics (largest rates of change in paper counts). We found that the field with the largest paper output across the years is ‘Economic Development’. The results reveal that t..

Academic honesty is crucial for scientific advancement, yet replication crises and misconduct scandals are omnipresent. We provide evidence on scientists’ truth-telling from two incentivized coin-tossing experiments with more than 1, 300 scientists. Experiment I, with predominantly European and North-American scientists, shows that fewer scientists over-report winning tosses when their professional identity is salient. The global Experiment II yields heterogeneous effects. We replicate Experiment I’s effect for North-American scientists, but find the opposite for Southern European and East-Asian scientists. Over-reporting correlates with publication metrics and country-level measures of ..

This study covers two topics: (1) the analysis of international inventor mobility and cooperation with the focus on Germany; (2) a mobility analysis for researchers in critical career positions in the German research system (professors in German universities, directors of non-university public research organisations, European Research Council and Emmy Noether grant holders). The study of inventor mobility was informed by a literature review. Transnational patent applications in the database PATSTAT in the period of 2000-2020 were analysed. The findings indicate that more inventors leave Germany than come here, however, Germany is an important connecting hub in the international inventor mobi..

This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5, 511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are rela..

In developed countries women have now achieved educational parity with men. Yet disparities persist in reaching top positions in the job market, with academia making no exception. This paper assesses the gender gap in career advancements in Italian universities over the 2013-2021 period, and explores the potential role of a third factor, i.e. mobility, besides competitiveness and scientific productivity typically investigated in the literature. The results, strongly robust, show a gender gap in advancements to associate professorship of about 4 percentage points, which is only partially explained by competitiveness, while scientific productivity and mobility do not seem to play a role. The e..

We analyze whether the social media popularity of scientists affects the number of academic citations. We use the COVID-19 global pandemic as a quasi-natural experiment exogenously increasing public attention and the demand for expertise. Using social media stars’ and their coauthors’ publications on COVID-related topics prior to the break out of the pandemic, we find that the social media star status added 1.10 citations following the breakout of COVID-19 per year per article, corresponding to 80% of the pre-COVID citation gap between stars and their coauthors. We find no significant treatment effect based on scientists’ Kardashian indexes.

The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First, we offer participants a hypothetical grant with randomized attributes and ask how the grant would influence their research strategy. Longer grants increase researchers' willingness to take risks, but only among tenured professors, which suggests that job security and grant duration are complements. Both longer and larger grants reduce researchers' focus on speed, which suggests a significant amount of racing in science is in pursuit of resources. But along..

We introduce a new survey of professors at roughly 150 of the most research-intensive institutions of higher education in the US. We document seven new features of how research-active professors are compensated, how they spend their time, and how they perceive their research pursuits: (1) there is more inequality in earnings within fields than there is across fields; (2) institutions, ranks, tasks, and sources of earnings can account for roughly half of the total variation in earnings; (3) there is significant variation across fields in the correlations between earnings and different kinds of research output, but these account for a small amount of earnings variation; (4) measuring professor..

This paper investigates the relationship between scientists' cognitive profile and their ability to generate innovative ideas and gain scientific recognition. We propose a novel author-level metric based on the semantic representation of researchers' past publications to measure cognitive diversity both at individual and team levels. Using PubMed Knowledge Graph (PKG), we analyze the impact of cognitive diversity on novelty, as measured by combinatorial novelty indicators and peer labels on Faculty Opinion. We assessed scientific impact through citations and disruption indicators. We show that the presence of exploratory individuals (i.e., cognitively diverse) is beneficial in generating dis..

-

This paper develops a better understanding of the explicit and implicit implications of the academic field’s competitization, with a specific focus on the role that academic social networks and platforms (ASNPs) play in this process. By applying a mixed-methods approach combining a structural analysis and a questionnaire study, we compare ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Twitter and ask how and to what extent they contribute to the competitive subjectivation of their users. Therefore, we differentiate between suggested and enacted subjectivation, i.e., different levels of amplifying the self-perception of a ‘competitive self.’ We particularly find that ResearchGate, which..

In an era characterised by unprecedented global challenges, Open Research practices have emerged as a powerful catalyst for research quality, transparency, and collaboration. Open Research need not be in tension with other drivers such as commercialisation, privacy, or national security, and it can boost institutional reputation and income. This briefing note sets out why Open Research should be a strategic imperative for institutions seeking to thrive in a dynamic academic landscape.

Assessment of potential academic staff members is necessary for making recruitment decisions. Amidst growing concern over the use of inappropriate quantitative indicators for research and researcher evaluation, institutions have begun to reform their policies to emphasise broader, responsible researcher assessment. To help implement such reforms, here we share a best practice Responsible Research(er) Recruitment Checklist for engaging with the principles of responsible research assessment in the writing of recruitment materials such as job adverts for research and academic roles. Aligned with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) principles, the checklist provides guida..