Motivated by the unprecedented boom in economic research during the pandemic, our project tracks research output in economics in order to quantify the effects of the pandemic containment measures on economists’ research productivity by gender and seniority.
We collect publicly available data on the research output from authors who have published articles in either the NBER Working Papers Series (since 2004), the CEPR Discussion Paper Series (since 2004), VoxEU (since it started), or the CEPR Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers (since it started).
Our preliminary results (based on the CEPR and the NBER; 2004-2020) indicate that:
There was a big increase in the number of papers and contributors in 2020; in fact, there was an increase in the average number of papers produced per person for all seniority groups. Midcareer women saw the smallest boost in productivity.
The share of women contributing to the CEPR and NBER in 2020 remained comparable to previous years (both overall and in Covid-related research. However, midcareer women represented the smallest share of contributors to Covid-related research.
Covid-related research was done in larger coauthorship groups. However, senior men contributed to Covid in smaller coauthorship groups.
You can find some of the data patterns in our data here: