The Diffusion of Hausman's Econometric Ideas

This paper examines the diffusion of Jerry Hausman's econometric ideas using citation counts, citing authors, and source journals of his most referenced citers. Bibliographic information and citation counts of references to econometrics papers were retrieved from Thomson Reuters Web of Science and analyzed to determine the various ways in which Hausman's ideas have spread in econometrics and related disciplines. Econometric growth analysis (Gompertz and logistic functions) is used to measure the diffusion of his contributions. This analysis reveals that the diffusion of Hausman's ideas has been pervasive over time and disciplines. For example, his seminal 1978 paper continues to be strongly cited along exponential growth with total cites mainly in econometrics and other fields such as administrative management, human resources, and psychology. Some of the more recent papers have a growth pattern that resembles that of the 1978 paper. This leads us to conclude that Hausman's econometric contributions will continue to diffuse in years to come. It was also found that five journals have published the bulk of the top cited papers that list Hausman as a reference, namely, Econometrica, Journal of Econometrics, Review of Economic Studies, Academy of Management Journal, and the Journal of Economic Literature. “Specification tests in econometrics” is Hausman's dominant contribution in this citation analysis. We found no previous research on the econometric modeling of citation counts as done in this paper. Thus, we expect to stimulate methodological improvements in future work.