Elite economics PhD programs aim to train graduate students for a lifetime of academic research. This paper asks how advising affects graduate students' post-PhD research productivity. Advising is highly concentrated: at the eight highly-selective schools in our study, a minority of advisors do...

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of trends in the publication and citation of economics scholarly research, with a focus on specialization within fields of economics research (i.e., applied, applied theory, econometrics methods, and theory). We collected detailed data on 24,273...

We evaluate the decentralized structure of the Federal Reserve System as a mechanism for generating and processing new ideas on monetary policy over the 1960 - 2000 period. We document the introduction of monetarism, rational expectations, credibility, transparency, and other monetary policy...

We examine the dynamics of a country's growth, consumption, and sovereign debt, assuming that the government is myopic and wants to maximize short-term, self-interested spending. Surprisingly, government myopia can increase a country's access to external borrowing. In turn, access to borrowing...

Most empirical work in economics has considered only a narrow set of measures as meaningful and useful to characterize individual behavior, a restriction justified by the difficulties in collecting a wider set. However, this approach often forces the use of strong assumptions to estimate the...

We provide a comprehensive overview of earnings, income and wealth inequality based on the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances from the United States. We document the current state of inequality and its evolution over the last three decades organizing the data along key demographic dimensions...

In recent years, comparative economics experienced a revival, with a new focus on comparing capitalist economies. The theme of the new research is that institutions exert a profound influence on economic development. We argue that, to understand capitalist institutions, one needs to understand...

The increasing demand for rigor in empirical economics has led to the growing use of auxiliary tests (balance, specification, over-identification, placebo, etc.) supporting the credibility of a paper's main results. We dub these "sniff tests" because standards for passing are subjective and...

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 study how citation patterns differ between journal tiers in economics. Concretely, we analyze citations patterns of more than 6,000 economics research articles published in top five, second tier, and top field economics journals between 1992 and 1996. In line with previous literature, we find...