This working paper provides an overview of the concept and practice of forensic economics by discussing four questions concerning the domain of this discipline. The first question asks whether forensic economics is a practical or academic enterprise, or both. The second one concerns the types of...

Abstract: The policy of the American Economic Review (AER) to publish unrefereed papers in the same volume as refereed ones gives economists the opportunity to pad their resumes by trying to pass Papers & Proceedings off as refereed AER articles. Using unique data on curricula vitae of...

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation-based indexes that could be used to rank academics. This paper examines how well several such indexes match labor market outcomes using data on the citation records of young tenured economists at 25 U.S. departments. Variants of...