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Discussion Paper
To Whom It May Concern: Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation
Letters of recommendation from faculty advisors play a critical role in the job market for Ph.D. economists. At their best, they can convey important qualitative information about a candidate, including the candidate’s potential to generate impactful research. But at their worst, these letters offer a subjective view of the candidate that can be susceptible to conscious or unconscious bias. There may also be similarity or affinity bias, a particularly difficult issue for the economics profession, where most faculty members are white men. In this post, we draw on our recent working paper to ...
Report
Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation for Economics Ph.D. Students
We analyze letters of recommendation for more than 2,200 economics and finance Ph.D. graduates and document that letters for female and Black or Hispanic job candidates are weaker in some dimensions, while letters for Asian candidates are notably less positive overall. Female and Asian candidates are less likely to be recommended to top academic departments. Letter characteristics, especially a top recommendation, have meaningful effects on initial job placements and journal publications. The effect appears to be causal—we instrument for better letters and still estimate a meaningful impact ...
Journal Article
A Journal Ranking Based on Central Bank Citations
We present a ranking of journals geared toward measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications. Our baseline ranking focuses on the period 2014-2023 and examines all items published in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. This ranking confirms the high policy relevance of journals specializing in macro, monetary, and international economics. Also, the major general interest economic journals are represented reasonably well in this ranking. In contrast, the major finance journals fare ...
Report
Star Wars at Central Banks
We investigate the credibility of central bank research by searching for traces of researcher bias, which is a tendency to use undisclosed analytical procedures that raise measured levels of statistical significance (stars) in artificial ways. To conduct our search, we compile a new dataset and borrow 2 bias-detection methods from the literature: the p-curve and z-curve. The results are mixed. The p-curve shows no traces of researcher bias but has a high propensity to produce false negatives. The z-curve shows some traces of researcher bias but requires strong assumptions. We examine those ...
Working Paper
RePEc, a Tool and Open Dataset for and about Economists
RePEc is an initiative created by economists for economists in 1997. It functions primarily as a bibliographic tool, but it also collects various linked metadata about economists, their institutions, and their impact. Thus, a labor economist may be interested in RePEc beyond literature searches and tracking—namely, as a dataset describing a profession, its members, and their output. This essay describes RePEc’s origins and history, the many facets of its data and how the data can be accessed. It also provides some examples of scholarly studies leveraging RePEc data that could be of ...
Report
Online Appendix for: Comment on "Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back"
This appendix contains the pre-registered analysis for our comment on “Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back” by Brodeur et al (2016). To structure the analysis, we reproduce the pre-registration; our results appear in red under each of the relevant parts. The time-stamped version of the pre-registration is available from the Open Science Framework website at the address https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/58MNJ.To understand this appendix deeply, we recommend carefully reading Brodeur et al (2016). The body of our comment paper outlines only the intuition of their method. In some of the ...
Working Paper
A journal ranking based on central bank citations
We present a ranking of journals geared toward measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications, such as their working paper series. Whereas this ranking confirms the policy relevance of the major general interest journals in the field of economics, the major finance journals fare less favourably. Journals specialising in monetary economics, international economics and financial intermediation feature highly, but surprisingly not those specialising in econometrics. The ranking is topped by the Brookings ...
Working Paper
A journal ranking based on central bank citations
We present a ranking of journals geared towards measuring the policy relevance of research. We compute simple impact factors that count only citations made in central bank publications. Our baseline ranking focuses on the period 2014–2023 and examines all items published in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) database. This ranking confirms the high policy relevance of journals specialising in macro, monetary and international economics. Also, the major general interest economic journals feature reasonably well in this ranking. In contrast, the major finance journals fare somewhat less ...
Working Paper
Demographic Differences in Letters of Recommendation for Economics Ph.D. Students
We analyze 6,400 letters of recommendation for more than 2,200 economics and finance Ph.D. graduates from 2018 to 2021. Letter text varies significantly by field of interest, with significantly less positive and shorter letters for Macroeconomics and Finance candidates. Letters for female and Black or Hispanic job candidates are weaker in some dimensions, while letters for Asian candidates are notably less positive overall. We introduce a new measure of letter quality capturing candidates that are recommended to "top" departments. Female, Asian, and Black or Hispanic candidates are all less ...