Do Economists Swing for the Fences after Tenure?

Jonathan Brogaard, Joseph Engelberg and Edward Van Wesep

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2018, vol. 32, issue 1, 179-94

Abstract: Using a sample of all academics who pass through top 50 economics and finance departments from 1996 through 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure of risk and find that both the number of publications and the portion consisting of "home runs" peak at tenure and fall steadily for a decade thereafter. Similar patterns hold for faculty at elite (top 10) institutions and for faculty who take differing time to tenure. We find the opposite pattern among poorly cited publications: their numbers rise post-tenure.

JEL-codes: A11 A20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
Note: DOI: 10.1257/jep.32.1.179
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.32.1.179 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... 8nqloNCS04x0s-azw5Dn (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... q-9UVAJFCLQe-Dcvh85B (application/zip)

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:aea:jecper:v:32:y:2018:i:1:p:179-94

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 (mpa@aeapubs.org).