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Scholarly impact and the timing of major awards in economics

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Often, those who have accomplished a great deal will respond bitterly to the offer, late in their career, of a symbolic kind of recognition that ‘ought’ to have been given them long before.

Merton (1973: 436)

Abstract

The present study extends prior analysis of the link between winning the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and winning the John Bates Clark Medal, arguably the two most prestigious awards in the discipline, by examining the length of time between bestowal of the two awards using a right-censored tobit model. In doing so, we find that an increase of one standard deviation in the impact of a Clark Medal winner’s research portfolio is enough to reduce the time span between bestowal of these two honors by almost 10 years, an important consideration given that the more prestigious award, the Nobel Prize, is not conferred posthumously. Furthermore, our results also suggest that institutional affiliation is also important in reducing time between bestowals. In this regard, affiliation with any one of three institutions, namely Princeton, Stanford and Chicago, appears to significantly reduce this time span by 10 or more years.

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Notes

  1. Merton (1973, p. 341) quotes the endocrinologist Selye, who emphasized that all scholars whom he knew sufficiently well were extremely anxious to have their work recognized by their peers. Darwin (1958, p. 55) noted in his autobiography that “What is far more important, my love of natural science has been steady and ardent. This pure love has, however, been much aided by the ambition to be esteemed by my fellow naturalists.”

  2. The constraints and the job profiles, together with the environmental conditions, are clearly spelled out in academia, meaning that it is akin to a real-world laboratory in which many aspects can be held constant. Moreover, recent years have seen an increased effort among university administrators to find metrics for incentivizing and enhancing productivity.

  3. See also www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/nomination/.

  4. www.aeaweb.org/honors_awards/nobel_laureates.php.

  5. See www.aeaweb.org/honors_awards/clark_medal.php.

  6. Economists under age 40 of all nationalities are eligible for the JBCM, provided they are affiliated with an American institution at the time the Medal is awarded. For example, the second female winner of the Medal (in 2010), Esther Duflo, is a French economist who is affiliated with MIT.

  7. Mixon and Upadhyaya (2014) also point out that the JBCM remained vacant in 1953, otherwise it has been awarded on every appropriate occasion since 1947.

  8. Media reports by Rampel (2009) and Shah (2014) indicate that a number of JBCM winners have also gone on to win the NPE, including the aforementioned Samuelson and Friedman, and also Joseph Stiglitz. See Mixon and Upadhyaya (2011, 2012) and Faria et al. (2016, 2017) for more on how these and other awards relate to institutional quality in the U.S. and Europe.

  9. Seven of the first 10 JBCM winners (70%) subsequently won the NPE. The Medal’s (unofficial) Wikipedia page notes that 11 of the first 17 JBCM awardees (about 65%) also later won the NPE. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bates_Clark_Medal.

  10. Frey and Neckermann (2009b, p. 181) suggest, however, that “academics should be immune to awards as a form of social flattery.”

  11. Results of a large-scale natural field experiment that implemented a new award scheme at Wikipedia indicate that even a purely symbolic award without material or career-related implications has a sizable effect on newcomer retention. In Wikipedia’s case, the retention rate (i.e., the share of editors remaining active) increased by 20% in the month following bestowal of the award, and continued to significantly exceed that of a control group over a period of four quarters (Gallus 2017).

  12. In fact, these authors indicate that maintenance of significantly differentiated ways of recognizing star employees should be among the critical components of a firm’s talent development program (Martin and Schmidt 2010, p. 57).

  13. This result is somewhat contrary to the earlier finding by Hamermesh and Schmidt (2003) suggesting that characteristics in addition to candidate quality (e.g., candidate nationality) shape the likelihood of election to Fellow of the Econometric Society. For related studies on possible favoritism in academic research, see Laband et al. (2002), Mixon and Sawyer (2005), Chan and Torgler (2014), Torgler and Piatti (2013), and Chan et al. (2015).

  14. The HHMI is a highly regarded institution in the biomedical research field whose selection committee consists mostly of members of the National Academy of Sciences.

  15. Citing Gordon (1997), Chan and Torgler (2012) point out that Ragnar Frisch and Irving Fisher were the driving forces behind the establishment of the Econometric Society. Frisch, who later shared the first NPE with Jan Tinbergen in 1969, would (in 1933) become the first editor of Econometrica, the Society’s official journal (Chan and Torgler 2012).

  16. At the beginning of their study, Chan and Torgler (2012) point out that of the 69 NPE awarded between 1969 and 2011, only nine were not or are not Econometric Society Fellows.

  17. The John Bates Clark Medal is arguably the second-most prestigious award that an American economist can receive. More on the profile of this award is provided later in this study.

  18. Interestingly, in their examination of the highest honor a mathematician can achieve, namely the Fields Medal, Borjas and Doran (2015) find that recipients’ publication rate declines after the award, leading to a substantial gap in relation to their contenders who were characterized with similar pre-award performance.

  19. The survey experiment was conducted online with the employees of an IBM research laboratory wherein a hypothetical award has as impact on one’s stated willingness to contribute to a public good (Neckermann and Frey 2013).

  20. Neckermann and Frey (2013) also find one’s willingness to share information with co-workers is lower for gifts than for payments of equal value.

  21. In their review of experiments related to intra-firm social relations, Levitt and Neckermann (2014) conclude that there are a number of important topics that future field experiments should explore, such as recruiting and worker promotion and training.

  22. These results are consistent with those described earlier from Chan et al. (2014, p. 189), who also point out that awards and honors heighten the visibility of the recipient’s prior and future work, thus boosting citations to it.

  23. Confirmatory awards are based on explicit, pre-determined performance criteria, while discretionary awards rely on broad performance evaluations and may be used ex post to honor outstanding performance (Gallus and Frey 2016).

  24. In estimating (1) above, we explored the importance (or lack thereof) of several institutions that appear in Table 1. Our results focus mainly on the most important of these.

  25. The tobit model fits into a class of models wherein data on the dependent or response variable are typically censored on the left. For example, a seminal study by Tobin (1958) employs data from a survey of consumers wherein the dependent variable is the ratio of expenditures on durable goods to total disposable income. The two explanatory variables are the age of the head of household and the ratio of liquid assets to total disposable income (Tobin 1958). Given that many of the observations have values of 0 on the left-hand side variable, Tobin (1958) estimates a left-censored tobit model.

  26. The p value in the case of Chicago is 0.168.

  27. The p value in the case of California-Berkeley is 0.159.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Luigino Bruni for helpful comments on a prior version. The usual caveat applies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Economic Education, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA, USA

    Franklin G. Mixon Jr.

  2. School of Economics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Benno Torgler

  3. Department of Economics, University of New Haven, West Haven, CT, USA

    Kamal P. Upadhyaya

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  1. Franklin G. Mixon Jr.
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  2. Benno Torgler
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  3. Kamal P. Upadhyaya
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Correspondence to Franklin G. Mixon Jr..

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Mixon, F.G., Torgler, B. & Upadhyaya, K.P. Scholarly impact and the timing of major awards in economics. Scientometrics 112, 1837–1852 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2429-4

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