Race-related Research in Economics and Other Social Sciences

Imran Rasul, Arun Advani, Elliott Ash and David Cai

No 16115, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: How does economics compare to other social sciences in its study of issues related to race and ethnicity? We assess this using a corpus of 500,000 academic publications in economics, political science, and sociology. Using an algorithmic approach to classify race-related publications, we document that economics lags far behind the other disciplines in the volume and share of race-related research, despite having higher absolute volumes of research output. Since 1960, there have been 13,000 race-related publications in sociology, 4,000 in political science, and 3,000 in economics. Since around 1970, the share of economics publications that are race-related has hovered just below 2% (although the share is higher in top-5 journals); in political science the share has been around 4% since the mid-1990s, while in sociology it has been above 6% since the 1960s and risen to over 12% in the last decade. Finally, using survey data collected from the Social Science Prediction Platform, we find economists tend to overestimate the amount of race-related research in all disciplines, but especially so in economics.

JEL-codes: A11 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-05
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Working Paper: Race-related research in economics and other social sciences (2021)
Working Paper: Race-related research in economics and other social sciences (2021)
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