Current Research

Working Papers

Economics of Science

• Network effects or rent extraction? Evidence from editorial board rotation (with Bauke Visser)[pdf]  

- R & R at Economic Journal - 

A department’s yearly publication count in a journal increases when a member of the department joins the journal’s editorial board. The common interpretation of this fact—that during the board member’s tenure, departmental colleagues publish more—is inaccurate. In a sample of 106 economics journals covering 1990-2011, we estimate that of the observed increase in the publication count, 73% is (co-)authored by board members themselves. Their single-authored papers in a journal receive significantly less citations if they are on that journal’s editorial board. We find no evidence that they discover attractive papers among their colleagues that otherwise wouldn’t be published.

• On the Influence of Top Journals (joint with Sanjeev Goyal, Marco van der Leij and Gustavo Nicolas Paez) [pdf] 

We study the evolution of the influence of journals over the period 1970-2017. In the early 1970's, a number of journals had similar influence, but by 1995, the `Top 5' journals -- QJE, AER, RES, Econometrica, and JPE -- had acquired a major lead. This dominance has remained more or less unchanged since 1995. To place these developments in a broader context, we also study trends in sociology.  The trends there have gone the other way -- the field journals rose in influence, relative to the Top General journals. A model of journals as platforms is developed to understand these trends across time and across disciplines.

• On The Sharing of New Knowledge through Academic Journals (joint with Marcel Fafchamps, Sanjeev Goyal and Fulin Guo) [pdf coming soon] 

We examine the role of general and field journals in the diffusion of knowledge within and across disciplines and fields, using citation data as indicator of knowledge diffusion. Our analysis is organized around two key concepts: the cross-fertilization of ideas; and the importance of shared paradigms. We start from the assumptions that the cross-fertilization of ideas is central to the accumulation of knowledge, and that having a shared paradigm (e.g., common set of assumptions and concepts) facilitates the transfer of ideas across researchers. We then investigate which types of journals – i.e., field journals, general disciplinary journals, or multi-disciplinary journals – play the most important role in cross-fertilization of ideas within fields, across fields within a discipline, and across disciplines. Our results show that general-interest journals promote cross-fertilization: articles published within a given field receive more diverse citations when published in general journals compared to when they appear in their respective field journals. We also find that in disciplines with a dominant shared paradigm, field journals play a key role in introducing external ideas.  The results also show that top general journals serve as a badge of honor for researchers.

Network Economics

• Gender stereotypes and homophily in team formation  (with Antonio Cabrales, Ericka Rascón Ramírez and Ismael Rodriguez-Lara)  [pdf]  

Women often find themselves in teams that hinder their productivity and earnings. We analyze the role of homophily and gender stereotypes in preferences for team formation and examine the effect of information on changing these preferences. We find that women are expected to perform better in female-type tasks (such as text and emotion-recognition). However, people prefer forming teams with their same gender. Our findings suggest that information can mitigate -but it does not eliminate- the influence of homophily on team formation.

• The role of unobservable characteristics in friendship network formation (with Pablo Brañas-Garza,  Jaromír Kováríck)  [pdf] 

Inbreeding homophily is a prevalent feature of human social networks with important individual and group-level social, economic, and health consequences. The literature has proposed an overwhelming number of dimensions along which human relationships might sort, without proposing a unified empirically-grounded framework for their categorization. We exploit rich data on a sample of University freshmen, homogeneous in terms of age, race, religion, and education, and contrast the relative importance of observable vs. unobservable characteristics in their friendship formation. We employ Bayesian Model Averaging, a methodology explicitly designed to target model uncertainty and to assess the robustness of each candidate attribute while predicting friendships. We show that, while observable features (e.g. assignment of students to sections, gender, and smoking) are robust key determinants of whether two individuals befriend each other, unobservable attributes, such as personality, cognitive abilities, economic preferences, or socio-economic aspects, are largely sensible to the model specification, and thus not robust predictors of friendships.