Highlights of the CInSt research seminar with Sergey Popov

Sergey Popov presented his paper "Leadership in Scholarship: Editors' Influence on the Profession's Narrative" on CInSt research seminar on October 31st.

The authors focus on editors and coeditors of the American Economic Review (AER) taking office between 1985 and 2011. They analyze how a new editor’s topic frequencies comove with topic frequencies observed in the AER before and during that editor’s tenure.

They use textual analysis to quantify the topic frequency in publications in the AER and ask if topics change after the appointment of the new editor. The size of the effect is quite small, amounting to a replacement of 1–3 regular papers in 100 by a paper that is devoted only to the newly appointed editor’s interests. 

The full paper is available here.