Geographical Concentration and Editorial Favoritism within the Field of Laboratory Experimental Economics

Janis Cloos, Matthias Greiff and Hannes Rusch

VfS Annual Conference 2020 (Virtual Conference): Gender Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: We examine geographical concentration, scientific quality, and editorial favoritism in the field of experimental economics. We use a novel data set containing all original research papers (𝑁 = 583) that exclusively used laboratory experiments for data generation and were published in the American Economic Review, Experimental Economics or the Journal of the European Economic Association between 1998 and 2018. The development of geographical concentration is examined using data on authors' affiliations at the time of the respective publication. Results show that research output produced by US-affiliated economists increased slower than overall research output, leading to a decrease in geographical concentration. Several proxies for scientific quality indicate that experiments conducted in Europe are of higher quality than experiments conducted in North America: European experiments rely on a larger total number of participants as well as participants per treatment, and receive more citations compared to experiments conducted in North America. Examining laboratory experiments published in the AER more closely, we find that papers authored by economists with US-affiliations receive significantly fewer citations in the first 5 and 10 years after publication compared to papers by authors from the rest of the world.

Keywords: laboratory experiments; favoritism; geographical concentration; methodological standards; network effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 A14 C90 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-net and nep-sog
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Geographical Concentration and Editorial Favoritism within the Field of Laboratory Experimental Economics (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc20:224565

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