Research Ethics Education in Economics

Abstract

In this paper, we report the findings from the data we collected from a survey in order to measure how common research ethics education in economics is. We have found out that (1) research ethics is taught in only a very few economics departments around the globe; (2) topics related to research ethics are not taught in courses on economics and ethics; and (3) the number of papers published in specialised peer-reviewed journals on economics education is only a tiny fraction of the number of papers published in these journals. There has been no evidence in economics showing that economics departments have taken strong initiative on teaching research ethics to undergraduate and graduate students.     

A Feminist Comparative Economic Systems

Abstract

This study proposes that feminist research be integrated into the field of comparative economic systems (CES) and that CES return to its traditional institutionalist methodologies to facilitate more complete analyses of economic systems and feminist alternatives to these systems and institutions. The study describes the evolution of CES, drawing attention to an increasing reliance on econometric modeling that reflects a shift in focus away from systems. An inventory of research on women and gender that has appeared in CES journals and textbooks finds little on topics other than formal labor markets in transition economies. The study contrasts this literature on women and gender in transition economies to research on this topic by women from transition economies, a literature that CES journal authors do not reference. It concludes by proposing a feminist economics approach that focuses on gender-differentiated impacts of economic systems, analyses of households, and equity as a measure of progress.     

Environmental and resource economics: A Canadian retrospective

The paper reviews research contributions to environmental and resource economics by scholars in Canada. We focus mainly on work from the past 25 years but also highlight earlier pathbreaking work. We begin by looking at broad trends in research both internationally and within Canada. We then review Canadian contributions to various topics in the field. Canadians have played a leading role in the development of the field, especially in resource economics, international environmental economics and the valuation of environmental amenities.     

Five reasons for the use of network analysis in the history of economics

ABSTRACT

Network analysis is increasingly appreciated as a methodology in the social sciences. In recent years, it is also receiving attention among historians of science. History of economics is no exception in that researchers have begun to use network analysis to study a variety of topics, including collaborations and interactions in scientific communities, the spread of economic theories within and across fields, or the formation of new specialties in the discipline of economics. Against this backdrop, a debate is emerging about how network analysis can help address questions that are pertinent to the history of economics. With this paper, we want to push this debate one step forward by offering and discussing five reasons why network analysis should have a future in the history of economics.     

What topic modeling could reveal about the evolution of economics*

ABSTRACT

The paper presents the topic modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a form of text-mining aiming at discovering the hidden (latent) thematic structure in large archives of documents. By applying LDA to the full text of the economics articles stored in the JSTOR database, we show how to construct a map of the discipline over time, and illustrate the potentialities of the technique for the study of the shifting structure of economics in a time of (possible) fragmentation.     

A matter of opinion—How ecological and neoclassical environmental economists and think about sustainability and economics

The differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different professional associations. However, we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective. This paper presents empirical results from a German case study on how economists and others involved in sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics, how they group around these issues, how they feel about the current scientific divide, and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research.We analyze the data using cluster analysis. Based on a literature survey, we generated forty sustainability economics-related statements and asked 196 sustainability researchers about their degree of agreement or disagreement with these statements. In evaluating our survey results, we discuss to what extent the clusters that we identified do—or do not—represent the two schools of thought of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics. We also propose some fields of research that can help to bridge the gaps amongst sustainability economics researchers while clearly marking others that are more suitable for a scientific ‘competition of ideas’. Key results of the study are: We identify two primary scientific clusters, one clearly confirming the existence of the ecological-economics school of thought, and the other largely capturing the neoclassical environmental view. Yet, there are some surprising exceptions: Both schools of thought share a conceptual definition of sustainability that is integrative in considering ecological, societal and economic dimensions (‘three pillar concept’) and is geared at preserving the development potentials of society. We also find a shared critique of ‘pure economic growth’ strategies in our sample. These shared opinions may provide bridging concepts between the schools of thought. Also both clusters agree with respect to a wide range of future fields of sustainability economics research. Yet, the research agenda of the ecological-economics cluster contains a large number of additional topics, primarily related to social, distributional and evolutionary aspects of sustainable development. Strong divides between the clusters that seem to be more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas are primarily related to the question of how to achieve sustainability, including appropriate environmental policies.     

Quantifying central banks’ scientization: why and how to do a quantified organizational history of economics

ABSTRACT

A subset of research in the history of economics is organizational history – i.e. the study of the organizations producing, circulating and applying economic ideas. This article maintains that some research questions in organizational history call for quantitative methods because they ask about magnitudes. More precisely, we claim that quantitative methods should complement rather than replace other research methods when the research question is at least partly about magnitudes. We walk the walk with a study of one type of organization, central banks, and of its changing relationship with economic science. Our results point unambiguously toward a growing dominance of central banks in the specialized field of monetary economics. Central banks have swelling research armies, they publish a growing share of the articles in specialized scholarly journals, and these articles tend to have more impact today than the articles produced outside central banks.     

Influencing the perception of what and who is important in ecological economics

In a recent article using citation analysis Hoepner et al. (2012) make strong claims to have identified the most influential works, authors, journals and institutions in a hypothetical field they call environmental and ecological economics. This paper shows that their work is biased by its framing, far from the non-subjective approach they claim and highly sensitive to minor data errors. More than this the exercise can be seen as another example of how ecological economics is susceptible to suppression by a dominant mainstream economic perspective which attempts to override, belittle and dismiss a whole range of alternative thought, including that which is heterodox, interdisciplinary, from the natural sciences and based in the non-economic social sciences. Ecological economics is not the same as agricultural, resource or environmental economics, and if it were it would be pointless. Neither can it be understood or treated as a subfield of resource and environmental economics, as done by Hoepner et al. (2012). I argue that the study promotes a limited perspective on social, environmental and economic problems that includes an implicit political and ideological framing. What is most influential, important or high quality in ecological economics is certainly not defined by such work.     

Research Trends and Opportunities in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics

The research questions and topics most likely to emerge in the near term future are assessed. A common theme is that policy issues will be an important driving force, as has generally been true in the past. More specifically, future theoretical advances are expected to occur in the treatment of uncertainty, the incorporation of stock service flows into natural resource analysis, and the incorporation of institutional considerations into models of resource exploitation. Research on valuation is expected to remain vigorous, primarily in the testing of basic assumptions and reconciliation of existing inconsistencies. Opportunities in renewable resource economics center on the incorporation of richer behavioral and technological detail in the general frameworks that already exist. A better understanding of what drives technology, and how environmental agreements can be negotiated and enforced among sovereign nations, are two topics likely to shape future research on global externalities. Finally, questions related to spatial aspects of natural resource use, and matters of land use more generally, seem likely to emerge as important topics on the profession's future research agenda.     

Accounting for Latent Attitudes in Willingness-to-Pay Studies: The Case of Coastal Water Quality Improvements in Tobago

The study of human behaviour and in particular individual choices is of great interest in the field of environmental economics. Substantial attention has been paid to the way in which preferences vary across individuals, and there is a realisation that such differences are at least in part due to underlying attitudes and convictions. While this has been confirmed in empirical work, the methods typically employed are based on the arguably misguided use of responses to attitudinal questions as direct measures of underlying attitudes. As discussed in other literature, especially in transport research, this potentially leads to measurement error and endogeneity bias, and attitudes should rather be treated as latent variables. In this paper, we illustrate the use of such an Integrated Choice and Latent Variable model in the context of beach visitors?? willingness-to-pay for improvements in water quality. We show how a latent attitudinal variable, which we refer to as a pro-intervention attitude, helps explain both the responses from the stated choice exercise as well as answers to various rating questions related to respondent attitudes. The incorporation of the latent variable leads to important gains in model fit and substantially different willingness-to-pay patterns.     

Power and publications in Chinese academia

In power-oriented societies, academia may not be immune to the influence of power. This paper studies the power-publication link by applying an event-study strategy to a panel dataset of the publication and biographical information of deans of economics schools in Chinese universities. We find that (i) deanship increases an individual's publication by 0.7 articles per year; (ii) the increased publications stem from work coauthored with other researchers within the same university; (iii) the topics of the increased publications are more likely to deviate from the deans’ research area prior to becoming deans; and (iv) the power effect is smaller for top universities and leading journals, and for scholars with more pre-dean publications. These patterns appear consistent with the role of power in resource allocation rather than the impact of ability or reputation of the deans and thus have implications on distortions in knowledge production.     

The Editorial Boards of Italian Economics Journals: Women,Gender, and Social Networking

In Italy, women's advancement in economics has been curtailed by the structure of editorial boards of Italian economics journals. In this paper, we examine the presence of men and women economists on the editorial boards of thirty-six Italian economics journals published since 1970 and analyze the gender distribution across different kinds of boards, roles, and fields. Because boards are hierarchically ordered, women work mostly in the lower positions, and the increase in women's participation has led only to more "editorial secretaries." Since men and women tend to have different scientific interests and men's standards of academic value prevail, women economists cannot build publication records as strong as those of their male colleagues, which, in turn, affects women's hiring, promotion, and wages, as well as the shape of the discipline.     

Authorship,Collaboration, Topics,and Research Gaps in Environmental and Resource Economics 1991–2015

Environmental and Resource Economics is one of the premier journals in the field of environmental economics. It was established with an aspiration to focus more on applied and policy relevant research compared to other established journals, and to establish better channels of communication and collaboration between researchers from Europe and other parts of the world. We present a text based exploratory analysis of 1630 articles published in the Journal from 1991 to 2015 that suggests the Journal has been somewhat successful in meeting both these aims. Perhaps more importantly, it shows the Journal continues to progress toward these goals. The European authors are the largest contributors to the Journal, which is in contrast to other prominent journals (such as Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Ecological Economics). And while most of the collaboration has occurred within this geographic region (e.g., European authors collaborated with other European authors more frequently), this trend appears to be changing as the proportion of articles written by international collaborators is gradually increasing. Topic analysis reveals that almost all of the articles could be grouped under applied and/or policy relevant topics, and almost two-thirds of the articles are empirical in nature, which suggest that the journal has been able to fulfil both of its commitments. We also investigate trends in research foci over the last 25 years and what kind of research gaps can be discerned.     

The impact of economics on management

This article analyzes the impact of economics on management by examining citations of 71 management journals. AER, JPE, Econometrica and QJE have the highest impact. Industrial organization journals also have a particularly large impact. The share of economics in management citations drops from 9.91 percent until 1995 to 5.70 percent for 1996–2005. Three possible explanations for this decrease are analyzed: economics research became more mathematical; because management is a younger discipline, it grew faster than economics in quantity and quality of research; and interdisciplinary spillover of research is slower than the spillover within a discipline. Only the second explanation is supported by the data.     

The breakdown of the IS–LM synthesis: implications for post-Keynesian economic theory

The monetarist and the new classical economics attack routed the IS–LM version of Keynesian theory and the large scale econometric models from the centre of macroeconomic research. However monetarism and the new classical economics were more successful as a critique of the IS–LM orthodoxy than as a basis for fruitful research and policy analysis.

Post-Keynesian economists also attack the IS–LM orthodoxy, mainly because it misspecified ‘… the economic society in which we actually live’. Post-Keynesians that emphasized financial and labour markets argued that properties of the real world economy made instability normal results ofmarket interactions.

The vacuum in main line theory that developed as the shortcomings of monetarism became evident led to a revival of interest in basic Keynesian propositions. This has spawned what is now labeled a new Keynesian economics. New Keynesian economists conform to the modeling standards set by the new classical rational expectations school but claim to get Keynesian results. To a degree these results are compatible with propositions of post-Keynesian economics.

It is suggested that a convergence between the new and the post-Keynesian economics can be expected, and the result is likely to be fruitful.     

Economics research in Canada: a long-run assessment of journal publications

Abstract.  We examine the publications of authors affiliated with an economics research institution in Canada in (1) the Top-10 journals in economics according to journals' impact factors, and (2) the Canadian Journal of Economics . We consider all publications in the even years from 1980 to 2000. Canadian economists contributed about 5% of publications in the Top-10 journals and about 55% of publications in the Canadian Journal of Economics over this period. We identify the most active research centres and identify trends in their relative outputs over time. Those research centres successful in publishing in the Top-10 journals are found to also dominate the Canadian Journal of Economics . Additionally, we check the robustness of our findings with respect to journal selection, and we present data on authors' PhD origin, thereby indicating output and its concentration in graduate education.     

从自然资源经济学到可持续经济学

随着物质生活水平的快速提高,人类也面临着诸如森林退化、土地荒漠化、物种多样性丧失以及温室效应恶化等生存环境问题。可持续发展问题日益受到人们的关注,通过经济学的视角来研究可持续发展的可持续经济学得到了快速的发展。本文从经济学的角度界定了自然资源的概念,回顾了经济学对自然资源的研究历程,对自然资源经济学的起源、发展进行了评述;论证了自然资源经济学和可持续经济学的关系,指出在可持续发展问题研究中融合自然资源经济学和环境经济学的必然性,以自然资源经济学和环境经济学为重要元素的可持续经济学是可持续问题经济研究的高级阶段,文章进一步探讨了可持续经济学的分析框架、发展现状及存在的问题。     

The citation field of evolutionary economics

Evolutionary economics has developed into an academic field of its own, institutionalized around, amongst others, the Journal of Evolutionary Economics (JEE). This paper analyzes the way and extent to which evolutionary economics has become an interdisciplinary journal, as its aim was: a journal that is indispensable in the exchange of expert knowledge on topics and using approaches that relate naturally with it. Analyzing citation data for the relevant academic field for the Journal of Evolutionary Economics, we use insights from scientometrics and social network analysis to find that, indeed, the JEE is a central player in this interdisciplinary field aiming mostly at understanding technological and regional dynamics. It does not, however, link firmly with the natural sciences (including biology) nor to management sciences, entrepreneurship, and organization studies. Another journal that could be perceived to have evolutionary acumen, the Journal of Economic Issues, does relate to heterodox economics journals and is relatively more involved in discussing issues of firm and industry organization. The JEE seems most keen to develop theoretical insights.     

A Case Study of Pluralism in Economics: The Heterodox Glass Ceiling in Italy

ABSTRACT

Quantitative measures of supposed scientific ‘quality’ (or ‘impact’) based on bibliometric indicators are used as the primary or exclusive tools of research evaluation in a growing number of countries. The negative impact of this method of evaluation on pluralism in economic teaching and research has been documented in Italy, France, Australia and the United Kingdom. We provide new evidence for Italy by investigating the CVs and publications of all candidates for the ‘national scientific qualification’, which is needed to access all tenured Italian academic positions. With respect to past evidence, we focus on the homologation of research topics and methods as well as the delegitimization of particular publication outlets. Our analysis has relevant implications internationally. First, research evaluation aimed at identifying ‘excellence’ often boils down to (as in the case of Italy) the adoption of rankings of supposedly top journals, which systematically discriminate against heterodox journals. Second, the legitimacy of academic research published in the form of books and book chapters must be reclaimed. Third, heterodox economists risk discrimination not so much because of their methods or policy recommendations, but because of the topics and research fields they investigate.