Arguably, one of the most important developments in the field of applied economics during the last decades has been the emergence of systematic policy evaluation, with its distinct focus on the establishment of causality. By contrast to the natural sciences, the objects of our scientific...

This paper discusses the link between Ramp;D and productivity across the European industrial and service sectors. The empirical analysis is based on both the European sectoral OECD data and on a unique micro longitudinal database consisting of 532 top European Ramp;D investors. The main...

Journals favor rejection of the null hypothesis. This selection upon tests may distort the behavior of researchers. Using 50,000 tests published between 2005 and 2011 in the AER, JPE, and QJE, we identify a residual in the distribution of tests that cannot be explained by selection. The...

The past half‐century has seen economic research become increasingly empirical, while the nature of empirical economic research has also changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, an empirical economist's typical mission was to "explain" economic variables like wages or GDP growth. Applied econometrics...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...

A new generation of data sets became available recently in the research data centres of the German statistical offices. These new data combine information for firms gathered in different surveys (or from other sources) that could not be analyzed jointly before. This paper offers a short...

At the 2016 Academy of Management Conference, a group of distinguished compensation researchers held a panel discussion on the future of compensation research. Their remarks were compiled into an article published in this issue. Soon after the panel, Charles Fay commissioned a similar discussion...

This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in Top Five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments. Analyzing the job histories of tenure-track economists hired by the top 35 U.S. economics departments, we find that T5 publications have a...

We use the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study which attributes characterize a top-scoring (four-star) publication in Economics and Econometrics. We frame the analysis as a classification problem and, using information in official documents, derive conditions to infer the...

Using data on articles published in the top-five economic journals in the period 1991 to 2010, we explore whether the gender composition of editorial boards is related to the publishing success of female authors and to the quality of articles that get published. Our results show that female...