| On several occasions in the past, this column has pointed out that when you read research papers, you are struck by two facts. First, only research by Big Shot Economists is cited in the references which is fine if you want to impress the reader and curry favour with the Big Shots. Second, it is rare to find research that is older than ten years being cited. |
| I have discussed this with academic economists and none has managed to come with a properly satisfactory and comprehensive explanation. But now comes a paper* by Joshua Aizenman and Kenneth Kletzer of the University of California at Santa Cruz that puts the issue in perspective. |
| Aizenman and Kletzer say they have sought to figure out a pattern in the way economists are cited by other researchers. It turns out that there is indeed a pattern and it has to do with, amongst other things, the death of the economist in question. |
| The "paper views premature death as a tragic 'natural experiment,' outlining a methodology identifying the 'citation death tax' "" the impact of death of productive economists on the patterns of their citations." In a nutshell, if you die, your papers will gradually cease to be cited. |
| If true, and it seems to be, this is an amazing finding. The importance of the work of an economist does not depend entirely on its intrinsic value but on whether the chap is around to push a few buttons or not. |
| This certainly explains the question I had posed on my first column on this subject: why do papers on macroeconomics never cite Keynes? The answer is clear: the poor man died in 1946. |
| The authors have relied on 428 papers written by 16 well-known economists, all of whom who died young. What they have found is that in the works of half of these people, "the estimated average missing citations per paper attributed to premature death ranges from 40 per cent to 140 per cent (the overall average is about 90 per cent), and the annual costs of lost citations per paper are in the range 3 per cent and 14 per cent." This means that "a paper written ten years before the author's death avoids a citation cost that varies between 30 per cent and 140 per cent...For the other half of the sample, there is no citation death tax." |
| It also seems that there is money to be made from citations in the sense that previous research has shown that "the salaries of economists have risen significantly with cumulative citations." The link is obvious. The more you are cited, the better you are assumed to be as an economist. |
| One other finding is of importance. In an experiment carried out by the American Economic Review, it turned out that "referees are swayed by information other than just the content of submissions." |
| In the end, when you pare the findings right down to the bone, academic economics and economists stand exposed as a networking racket. You scratch my back, and I will scratch yours seems as true of this business as of any other. |
| I want to make two original contributions here. One, what about market failure because of informational failure? That is, if a set of dunderhead economists go on citing each other "" which happens, believe me "" will we be left eventually with third and second raters ruling the roost? To put it differently, if citations are as flawed as they appear to be at present, will the current system help only shit to float to the top? The answer, sadly, seems to be yes. |
| The second contribution pertains to economists stealing ideas from journalists in that they never bother to cite them as the place where they got the idea from. What do we do about this? |
| *The Life Cycle of Scholars and Papers in Economics "" the "Citation Death Tax", NBER Working Paper No. 13891, March 2008, http://www.nber.org/papers/w13891 |
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