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Economic Research Evolves: Fields and Styles

Joshua Angrist¹; Pierre Azoulay²; Glenn Ellison¹; Ryan Hill³; Susan Lu⁴

¹ Department of Economics, MIT, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142, and NBER (e-mail: ) · ² Sloan School of Management, 100 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, and NBER (e-mail: ) · ³ Department of Economics, MIT, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142 (e-mail: ) · ⁴ Purdue University, 403 W. State Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907, and Northwestern University (e-mail: )

We examine the evolution of economics research using a machine-learning-based classification of publications into fields and styles. The changing field distribution of publications would not seem to favor empirical papers. But economics' empirical shift is a within-field phenomenon; even fields that traditionally emphasize theory have gotten more empirical. Empirical work has also come to be more cited than theoretical work. The citation shift is sharpened when citations are weighted by journal importance. Regression analyses of citations per paper show empirical publications reaching citation parity with theoretical publications around 2000. Within fields and journals, however, empirical work is now cited more.

DOI

10.1257/aer.p20171117

Volume

107 (5)

Pages

293-297

Language

en

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BibTeX

Sources

crossref openalex