Since the late twentieth century there has been a growing interest in academic and political circles on inequality. In this paper, we develop a systematic analysis of the literature on this topic published in economic journals since the 1950s. This is done through an innovative approach that...

The scholarly impact of academic research matters for academic promotions, influence, relevance to public policy, and others. Focusing on writing style in top-level professional journals, we examine how it changes with age, how stylistic differences and age affect impact, and how style and prior...

The internet and other large textual databases contain billions of documents: is there useful information in the number of documents written about different topics? We propose, based on the premise that the occurrence of a phenomenon increases the likelihood that people write about it, that the...

In universities all over the world, hiring and promotion committees regularly hear the argument: "this is important work because it is about to appear in prestigious journal X". Moreover, those who allocate levels of research funding, such as in the multi-billion pound Research Assessment...

The salient rank-size rule known as Zipf's law is not only satisfied for Germany's national urban hierarchy, but also for the city size distributions in single German regions. To analyze this phenomenon, we build on the insights by Gabaix (1999) that Zipf's law follows from a stochastic growth...

We collect data on the movement and productivity of elite scientists. Their mobility is remarkable: nearly half of the world's most-cited physicists work outside their country of birth. We show they migrate systematically towards nations with large R&D spending. Our study cannot adjudicate on...

"Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers, which is the convention in the economics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose last name initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been a first author more...

This examination of the role and potential for replication in economics points out the paucity of both pure replication checking on others' published papers using their data and scientific replication using data representing different populations in one's own work or in a Comment. Several...