EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

What's in a Surname? The Effects of Surname Initials on Academic Success

Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006, vol. 20, issue 1, 175-187

Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the effects of surname initials on professional outcomes in the academic labor market for economists. We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology. We suspect the "alphabetical discrimination" reported in this paper is linked to the norm in the economics profession prescribing alphabetical ordering of credits on coauthored publications. We also investigate the extent to which the effects of alphabetical placement are internalized by potential authors in their choices to work with different numbers of coauthors as well as in their willingness to follow the alphabetical ordering norm.

Date: 2006
Note: DOI: 10.1257/089533006776526085
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (77)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/089533006776526085 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What's in a Surname? The Effect of Surname Initials on Academic Success* (2004) Downloads
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:aea:jecper:v:20:y:2006:i:1:p:175-188

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Perspectives is currently edited by Enrico Moretti

More articles in Journal of Economic Perspectives from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:aea:jecper:v:20:y:2006:i:1:p:175-188