Academic journals disseminate new knowledge, and editors of prominent journals are in a position to affect the direction and composition of research. Using machine learning procedures, we measure the influence of editors of the American Economic Review (AER) on the relative topic structure of...

Much of human knowledge is produced in the world's university departments. There is little scientific evidence, however, about how those hundreds of thousands of departments are best organized and led. This study hand-collects longitudinal data on departmental chairpersons in 58 US universities...

Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are the rankings mania, increased division of labor in research, intense publication pressure, academic fraud, dilution of the concept of “university,” and inadequate organizational forms for modern...