Science under Threat? A Natural Experiment in Economics

Dominic Rohner, Oliver Vanden Eynde and Philine Widmer

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Academic freedom has come under growing strain worldwide. To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a "blacklist" of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use of these flagged words among economists at universities that rely heavily on federal funding, relative to scholars from institutions that are less dependent on federal funding or based in the UK. The drop is driven by content related to gender, race, and environment. We show that changes are not simply semantic but reflect actual paper content and that neither the individual funding status nor time-invariant author characteristics are driving the effects. We also document interesting heterogeneous effects by department quality and author gender and ethnicity. Our findings are consistent with the idea that scholars respond strongly to political pressure.

Date: 2026-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.14164 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2608.14164

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().