marginal revolution read out: Rising concentration for economics awards
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This is marginal revolution read out. This episode covers the Marginal Revolution post titled Rising concentration for economics awards.
The first link shares the post's title, Rising concentration for economics awards. It presents the central finding from a working paper by Richard B. Freeman, Danxia Xie, Hanzhe Zhang, and Hanzhang Zhou. The authors analyzed the academic affiliations of nearly six thousand award-winning researchers across eighteen major fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences, from the eighteen twenties to the twenty twenties, with a focus on the period from the nineteen sixties onward. They found that for most fields, institutional concentration has declined: award-winning work has shifted from a few science-strong universities in high-income countries to a more diverse set of institutions around the world. But there is one striking exception. Economics has moved in the opposite direction. The institutional affiliations of prizewinning economists have become more concentrated over time, making economics the most concentrated field in their sample. The author of the Marginal Revolution post presents this finding and directs readers to the underlying paper, noting that it comes from the four researchers and crediting Robin Hanson for the pointer.
The second link is titled simply more. It goes to that same underlying National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, High and Rising Institutional Concentration of Award-Winning Economists, Working Paper thirty-five thousand eight hundred seventy-five, issued in October twenty twenty-six. The paper's abstract offers more detail on why economics differs. The authors associate the higher concentration of prizewinning work in economics with three factors. First, economics has stronger sorting by institutional prestige. Second, the field relies less on specialized equipment and instruments than many natural sciences, so physical infrastructure is less important. Third, economics assesses findings based on a synthesis of evidence rather than on decisive experiments or proofs, which may make reputation and networks more influential in determining which work is recognized. The paper also notes that the authors discuss the benefits and costs of this high and rising institutional concentration, though the abstract does not spell them out. The working paper appears in the NBER's labor studies program and related topics, and it includes acknowledgments to a long list of commentators and seminar audiences, including the AEA and ASSA meetings, Amazon Science, Chicago, Harvard, and the NBER Summer Institute.
Taken together, these two links amount to the same picture from different levels of detail: the broad claim in the blog post excerpt and the full working paper context. The striking pattern is that economics, often seen as the most scientific of the social sciences, is becoming more institutionally concentrated even as the rest of the research world becomes more dispersed. That raises questions about whether economics is rewarding the best ideas or the best addresses.