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What has mattered to economics since 1970
We compile the list of articles published in major refereed economics journals during the last 35 years that have received more than 500 citations. We document major shifts in the mode of contribution and in the importance of different sub-fields: Theory loses out to empirical work, and micro and macro give way to growth and development in the 1990s. While we do not witness any decline in the primacy of production in the United States over the period, the concentration of institutions within the U.S. hosting and training authors of the highly-cited articles has declined substantially.
That is from Kim, Morse, and Zingales; here is the paper.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 27, 2006 at 07:36 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
The world has caught up to the US in sports (pointing to the recent failings of our 'dream teams" in numerous sports recently)...now they're catching up in Econ.
I blame capitalism.
Posted by: Scott W at Sep 27, 2006 7:55:27 AM
"the concentration of institutions within the U.S. hosting and training authors of the highly-cited articles has declined substantially."
- I would argue that this is probably more due to the fact that researchers in other countries have (almost) stopped submitting papers
to, e.g. national, journals in non-english language and to a much larger extent than 20-30 years ago focus on the large international (english) journals.
Posted by: mike at Sep 27, 2006 8:07:57 AM
I misunderstood it all. Appareantly the is less concentration within the US but wihtout “benefting” Europe or the rest of the world. Hence, the US is still as dominant in publications but there is less concentration within the US.
Posted by: mike at Sep 27, 2006 8:12:26 AM
One thing this paper doesn't control for though is the quality of the citation. . Implicitly all citing papers are equal, and within each paper each citation is given equal weight. That must be why papers putting forward now standard econometric tests score so highly. But can we really say that White's heteroscedasticity correction was more important than the Lucas critique
Posted by: Bonapart O Cunasa at Sep 27, 2006 8:25:18 AM
"But can we really say that White's heteroscedasticity correction was more important than the Lucas critique?"
If you've done a modicum of empirical work, yes you can.
Posted by: Arsene at Sep 27, 2006 8:43:49 AM
Arsene,
More important for empirical work? yes.
More important for understanding economic behavior? doubtful.
Of course, some people think economics is only about doing regressions. *shrug*
Posted by: Student at Sep 27, 2006 10:59:31 AM
"More important" is not a useful phrase.
Comparing one paper from this list against another - what's the point?
What about other important papers that for whatever reason did not "score" 500 citations? How about some nominations?
Posted by: PJ at Sep 27, 2006 3:46:43 PM
those without NBER access can find the paper at http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/luigi.zingales/research/PSpapers/nber_cites.pdf
(actually, anyone can find the paper there.)
Posted by: Bill Conerly at Sep 27, 2006 7:36:40 PM
PJ,
Actually, this is a question concerning the integrity of this list.
As BOC pointed out, this paper assumes each citation carries the same weight.
Should it? How can you answer a question concerning the quality of a citation without first answering what makes a quality citation (i.e. what is actually "important")?
Posted by: Student at Sep 28, 2006 7:27:17 AM
Student,
What makes a given citation more important is very difficult to determine.
However, patterns of citiations are another matter. What, for example, is
the value of a theoretical article that leads to zero citations involving
operational propositions over many years? There are lots of theoretical
papers in economics that have distinguished themselves in this way for
contributing nothing to what we know about the observable world in which
we live.
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