CAPER
Visit our homepage to learn more about the project and the team. Below some graphs of the data patterns we see in our data.
There was a surge in working papers in 2020 even when we focus on non-Covid research alone: there were 383 more papers in 2020 as compared to the average in 2018-2019 (this is a 20.9% increase).
In addition, there were 469 papers on Covid-related topics leading to a total increase of 46.4% in 2020 compared to the average in 2018-2019.
The share of women contributing to the NBER and CEPR working papers has increased over time and 2020's share of women contributors to non-Covid research stayed on par with 2019 at 23.4%.
The number of women contributing to Covid research was quite comparable at 21.2%.
Zooming into monthly patterns by year, we see that there were more contributors in April-August of 2020 even when we focus on non-Covid research alone.
Covid research exacerbates these increases from March onwards.
Our preliminary results that looked at the first 4 months of 2020, showed that women were lagging behind in terms of their Covid-related contributions, and this figure suggests why: women started contributing to Covid-research in April (while men started in March).
There were 4,109 contributors to NBER and CEPR in 2020 as compared to 2,945 in 2019 and 2,941 in 2018. The increase was more pronounced for senior economists and junior women but all groups saw an increase in the number of contributors to these outlets.
As compared to previous years, in 2020 there was a shift towards bigger coauthorship groups. This shift was mainly driven by the coauthorship sizes in Covid-related research, where the share of women collaborating in groups of 5 rose to 11.8% (a 34.1% increase), and the share collaborating in groups of 6 and over increased to a staggering 25.2% (a 313.1% increase).
The probability that women's coauthorship groups of different sizes include a man, decreased in smaller groups and increased in larger ones.
In contrast, the probability that coauthorship groups of different sizes include a senior man decreased in larger groups and increased in smaller ones (this holds for both men and women).