MIT’s Rise to Prominence: Outline of a Collective Biography

Andrej Svorenčík ()
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Andrej Svorenčík: University of Pennsylvania

Chapter 3 in The Palgrave Companion to MIT Economics, 2025, pp 47-69 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Based on a wealth of untapped records of MIT economics PhDs and their advisers, this chapter reconstructs and analyses the adviser–advisee network at MIT. Such a prosopographic analysis depicts the MIT Economics Department as a fairly large community of economists who are, to a large extent, trained by a few key advisers who were mostly trained at MIT as well. Apart from this self-replication, MIT exhibits a large share of graduates who remain in American academia, which is disproportionate to the number of graduates it has produced. It is hypothesised that this has been an essential factor in MIT’s rise to prominence. Since the 1970s, MIT’s dominance has been ubiquitous. On a methodological level, this chapter introduces the prosopographic method to the field of history of economics.

Keywords: MIT economics; MIT economists; Prosopography; Academic networks; Academic family trees (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-77623-6_3

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-77623-6_3

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