The Warsh article is also relevant to the gatekeepers thread.
Yet a recent paper by Stephen Wu, an assistant professor of economics at Hamilton College, found that nearly half the pages published in the QJE between 2000 and 2003 (47 percent) came from authors affiliated with one of five elite institutions -- Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Princeton and Stanford. The same five schools accounted for 29 percent of the pages of the JPE and 22 percent of the AER during the same period. Perhaps the cleverest economists in all of economics were already concentrated at those institutions, Wu wrote, in which case the distribution was warranted. But that didn't explain the great disparity between the QJE and the other two journals -- nor did it shed light on why the trend of concentration, which had declined between 1950 and 1989 in both the QJE and the JPE, had been reversed. During Shleifer's tenure at the QJE, the four top institution's share of its pages more than doubled, to 43 percent from 19 percent. Conversations with leading theorists elsewhere have found open scorn for the QJE's policies during his reign. It would require a reportorial effort of the scale and depth in which The Wall Street Journal specializes to clarify these issues and pin them down. But, just for example, among the ten articles in the current issue of the QJE are papers co-authored by two of the journal's three editors, Harvard professors Glaser and Robert Barro, and a third article by Shleifer as well. Shleifer, meanwhile, has moved on to edit the Journal of Economic Perspectives for the American Economic Association, a position of, if anything, even greater power. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
