The Life Cycle of Scholars and Papers in Economics -- the "Citation Death Tax"

Joshua Aizenman and Kenneth Kletzer

No 13891, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The information content of academic citations is subject to debate. This paper views premature death as a tragic "natural experiment," outlining a methodology identifying the "citation death tax" -- the impact of death of productive economists on the patterns of their citations. We rely on a sample of 428 papers written by 16 well known economists who died well before retirement, during the period of 1975- 97. The news is mixed: for half of the sample, we identify a large and significant "citation death tax" for the average paper written by these scholars. For these authors, the estimated average missing citations per paper attributed to premature death ranges from 40% to 140% (the overall average is about 90%), and the annual costs of lost citations per paper are in the range 3% and 14%. Hence, a paper written ten years before the author's death avoids a citation cost that varies between 30% and 140%. For the other half of the sample, there is no citation death tax; and for two Nobel Prize-caliber scholars in this second group, Black and Tversky, citations took off overtime, reflecting the growing recognitions of their seminal works.

JEL-codes: B4 B54 C81 C92 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-sog
Note: ITI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Joshua Aizenman & Kenneth Kletzer, 2011. "The life cycle of scholars and papers in economics - the 'citation death tax'," Applied Economics, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 43(27), pages 4135-4148.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13891.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13891

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13891

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().