October 2012

IZA DP No. 6960: Fame and the Fortune of Academic Economists: How the Market Rewards Influential Research in Economics

revised version published in: Southern Economic Journal, 2015, 82(2), 430–452

We analyze the pay and position of 1,009 faculty members who teach in doctoral-granting economics departments at fifty-three large public universities in the United States. Using the Web of Science, we have identified the journal articles published by these scholars and the number of times each of these articles has been subsequently cited in published research articles. We find that research influence, as measured by various measures of total citations, is a surprisingly strong predictor of the salary and the prestige of the department in which professors are employed. We also examine how coauthorship is rewarded by the market.