Thursday, November 15, 2012

Fame! Fortune! Markets!

Hilmer, Hilmer, and Ransom have a new working paper where they analyze the pay of 1,009 US academic economists and estimated the effect of their journal articles on their salaries.

While I seriously doubt their estimation results---it appears to be a textbook example for endogeneity bias as unobserved ability will influence both the capacity to write good papers and to negotiate good salaries---the compiled data are interesting and they provide some interesting facts.

For example, of the almost 15,000 articles that were published before 2000, about one quarter were never cited (so far). Similarly interesting is the distribution of the Hirsch-Index presented in their Table 5: the median is at 5 and cumulative citations per author hover around 50.

"... but it is only articles in the elite journals that have an impact on pay."

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