nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2021‒03‒22
four papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Axventure AB

  1. Measuring Research Excellence Amongst Economics Lecturers in the UK By McManus, Richard; Mumford, Karen A.; Sechel, Cristina
  2. What Makes a Productive Ph.D. Student? By Alberto Corsini; Michele Pezzoni; Fabiana Visentin
  3. Gender Distribution across Topics in Top 5 Economics Journals: A Machine Learning Approach By J. Ignacio Conde-Ruiz; Juan José Ganuza; Manu García; Luis A. Puch
  4. Underrepresentation of Women in Undergraduate Economics Degrees in Europe: A Comparison with STEM and Business By Megalokonomou, Rigissa; Vidal-Fernández, Marian; Yengin, Duygu

  1. By: McManus, Richard (University of Canterbury); Mumford, Karen A. (University of York); Sechel, Cristina (University of Sheffield)
    Abstract: Using a rich new data source, we explore the selection of economics Lecturers into the last UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. Only some one-in-two (54%) of these Lecturers were submitted to REF2014; 57% of men and 46% of women. The decision making of Institutions is found to be well approximated by a simplified selection approach; focusing on working papers and higher quality journal publications. Our results also reveal sizeable conditional differences in the probability of selection, especially so in departments with higher research rankings. More than half of the variance in selection probability remains unexplained, revealing considerable idiosyncrasies in the management of submissions and uncertainty across the discipline in this research assessment process.
    Keywords: REF, gender, selection, outputs, quality, inclusivity
    JEL: J00 J44 J71
    Date: 2021–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14156&r=all
  2. By: Alberto Corsini (Université Côte d'Azur, France; CNRS, GREDEG); Michele Pezzoni (Université Côte d'Azur, France; CNRS, GREDEG); Fabiana Visentin (Maastricht University; UNU-MERIT)
    Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of the social environment to which a Ph.D. student is exposed on her scientific productivity during the training period. Vertical and horizontal relationships depict the social environment. Vertical relationships are those supervisor-student, while horizontal relationships are those student-peers. We characterize these relationships by assessing how the supervisor's and peers' biographic and academic characteristics relate to the student's productivity as measured by the publication quantity, quality, and scientific network size. Unique to our study, we cover the entire student population of a European country for all the STEM fields. Specifically, we analyze the productivity of 77,143 students who graduated in France between 2000 and 2014. We find that having a female supervisor is associated with a higher student's productivity as well as being supervised by a mid-career scientist and having a supervisor with a high academic reputation. The supervisor's fundraising ability benefits only one specific dimension of the student's productivity, i.e., the student's work quality. Interestingly, the supervisor's mentorship experience negatively associates with student's productivity. Having many peers negatively associates with the student's productivity, especially if peers are senior students. Having female peers positively correlates with the student's productivity, while peers' academic status shows mixed effects according to the productivity dimension considered. We find results heterogeneity when breaking down our sample by field of research.
    Keywords: French Ph.D. students, Productivity determinants, Social environment, Supervisor, Peers
    JEL: J24 O30
    Date: 2021–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gre:wpaper:2021-11&r=all
  3. By: J. Ignacio Conde-Ruiz; Juan José Ganuza; Manu García; Luis A. Puch
    Abstract: We analyze all the articles published in Top 5 economic journals between 2002 and 2019 in order to find gender di↵erences in their research approach. Using an unsupervised machine learning algorithm (Structural Topic Model) developed by Roberts et al. (2019) we characterize jointly the set of latent topics that best fits our data (the set of abstracts) and how the documents/abstracts are allocated in each latent topic. This latent topics are mixtures over words were each word has a probability of belonging to a topic after controlling by year and journal.
    Date: 2021–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2021-07&r=all
  4. By: Megalokonomou, Rigissa (University of Queensland); Vidal-Fernández, Marian (University of Sydney); Yengin, Duygu (University of Adelaide)
    Abstract: In the last decade, the proportion and academic performance of women who pursue university degrees has increased relative to men in a range of developing countries (OECD, 2015). Nonetheless, the percentage of undergraduate economics degrees awarded to women has remained between 30% and 35% during 2001-2018 in the U.S. (Siegfried, 2019). In a recent work by Lundberg and Stearns (2019), they show that the gender gap worsens as women economists progress in their professional careers in the U.S., where they end up representing only 10% of university professors. European countries seem to have less of a "leaky pipeline," where the same figure sits at 22% (Auriol, Friebel, and Wilhelm, 2020). To put this figure into perspective, our paper describes the cross-country underrepresentation of women graduating in economics degrees in Europe relative to their country-specific women/men university graduation rates. Second, we compare the underrepresentation of women in economics to its closest alternative namely business, as well as its gender underrepresented counterpart, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Finally, we lean on recent evidence to suggest policies to increase the relative share of women pursuing undergraduate economics degrees in Europe with a strong focus on policies aimed at high schools. Overall, we find that, over the period 2013-2018, the underrepresentation of women in economics graduates has worsened in Europe and that on average two of every five students are women. While the gender representation of university graduates in STEM is worse than in economics, it has experienced a mild increase over the period of study. Unlike Economics, its closest alternative, business, has a slight women overrepresentation, with 1.1 women graduating for every man.
    Keywords: women, economics, STEM, university
    JEL: J16 J24
    Date: 2021–03
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izapps:pp175&r=all

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