Over the past decade there has been a decline in the fraction of papers in top economics journals written by economists from the highest-ranked economics departments. This paper documents this fact and uses additional data on publications and citations to assess various potential explanations....

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation-based indexes that could be used to rank academics. This paper examines how well several such indexes match labor market outcomes using data on the citation records of young tenured economists at 25 U.S. departments. Variants of...

This paper shows that larger auctions are more efficient than smaller ones, but that despite this scale effect, two competing and otherwise identical markets or auction sites of different sizes can coexist in equilibrium. We find that the range of equilibrium market sizes depends on the...

This paper studies the way that word-of-mouth communication aggregates the information of individual agents. We find that the structure of the communication process determines whether all agents end up making identical choices, with less communication making this conformity more likely. Despite...

A large literature following Hirsch (2005) has proposed citation- based indexes of individuals' research output. This paper views Hirsch's index as one member of a larger class and examines how well different indexes align with labor market outcomes for young, tenured economists at 50 US...

This paper studies whether agents must agglomerate at a single location in a class of models of two-sided interaction. In these models there is an increasing returns effect that favors agglomeration, but also a crowding or market-impact effect that makes agents prefer to be in a market with...

type="main" <p>This paper considers a dynamic model of the evolution of open-source software projects, focusing on the evolution of quality, contributing programmers, and users who contribute customer support to other users. Programmers who have used open-source software (OSS) are motivated by...</p>