Fifty years of New Zealand Economic Papers: 1966 to 2015

ABSTRACT

New Zealand Economic Papers was launched in 1966, seven years after the New Zealand Association of Economists was established. This paper discusses the journal's development including challenges of establishing and editing it. We examine the nature of the contributions, the contributors, their origins, and the gender distribution of authors. We assess whether the growth in joint authorship evident in other fields of research is displayed in NZEP. We also examine how research has evolved over the life of the journal. The evolution of the content of the journal is related to economic developments and events in New Zealand and globally, and to developments in the economics profession. The journal continues to reflect contemporary New Zealand issues, which was one of the original aims of establishing the journal. It also displays an increasing use of theoretical and empirical techniques, joint authorship and contributions from overseas authors.

KEYWORDS:

• New Zealand Economic Papers
• New Zealand Association of Economists
• editorship
• joint authorship
• economics profession

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A10
• A110
• B00
• B31
• B40

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Brenda Bongiovanni, Arthur Grimes, Gary Hawke, Mark Holmes, Azreen Karim, Stephen Knowles, Gail Pacheco, John Randal, Brian Silverstone, and Anna Williams for their help at various stages of this work and participants at the NZ Association of Economists’ Conference, July 2015. We are also grateful to two referees for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Royal Economic Society also has a brief history of the establishment of The Economic Journal on its website (Royal Economic Society, 2015).

2. Each ‘reply’ is treated as a separate article, so that the relevant authors are counted as having published two articles on the subject. However, this applies to relatively few cases.

3. The total number of domestic and international students in formal tertiary education in New Zealand increased from 51,603 students in 1965 to 349,199 students in 2013 (Ministry of Education, 2014).

4 See Ministry of Education (2013) and Bakker, Boston, Campbell, and Smyth (2006).

5. Frank Holmes (2011) referred to the likelihood of this conflict. At the time the New Zealand Association of Economists’ Council was debating whether to launch a journal, he was President of the Central Council of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand. He recalled (2011, p. 6) that he had ‘established good relations with the Editorial Board of the Economic Record’ and that he ‘apparently reported that there was little likelihood of any conflict with the Economic Record’.

6. Keynes was Editor of The Economic Journal from 1911 to 1944 (Robinson, 1947).

7. See estimates by Laband and Piette (1994) of the impact of economic journals during the 1970s.

8. See the discussion in Millmow and Tuck (2013, pp. 113–114).

9. The universities that provided financial support were Lincoln College, Massey University, University of Canterbury, University of Otago, and Victoria University of Wellington (Holmes, 1966).

10 Hawke also invited reviews of policy documents and research papers, although these are not included in our definition of research articles and are therefore not examined here.

11. The ‘spike’ in the number of papers published in 2002 shown in Figure 1 was caused by a special issue on database integration and linked employer-employee data published as Issue 1.

12. D.H. MacGregor, Professor of Political Economy at Leeds and a former student of Alfred Marshall.

13. Whether Keynes was required by the Royal Economic Society to continue this practice or decided himself to do so in the light of the pressure of his other duties (which included appointment as Secretary of the Society in 1913) and the desire to impart a more professional approach to the role is unclear. However, the Society did require a change in the management approach for the journal. Robinson (1947) notes that Keynes's ‘relative inexperience (he was still only twenty-eight in a society in which then, as later, greyheads predominated) dictated the appointment of an editorial committee’ (Robinson, 1947, p. 15). The previous editor, Edgeworth, was a member of that committee.

14. A printing error occurred early in the series when issue 1 of volume 2 was incorrectly labelled on the front cover as issue 3 of volume 1.

15. The five journals analysed by Card and DellaVigna are The American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Review of Economic Studies.

16. The annual average number of authors per paper for the most recent years for NZEP and for the Card and DeVilla sample of five leading journals are similar to that reported by Wood (2014). Wood reports a mean of two authors (and a median of 3.5 authors) in his sample of papers published in accounting, economics, finance, management, marketing and psychology journals in 2012. The mean number of authors per paper is much higher at nine (and a median of 33 authors) in Wood's sample of papers published in natural sciences journals in 2012.

17. The preferred estimated trend equation for the annual average number of authors per paper published in NZEP from 1966 to 2015 is x_t = α₀ + α₁t ₊ α₂t² + α₃t³ + ϵ_it where x is average number of authors per paper, t is the time period for the observed x, α_n, n = 0....3, are constants and ϵ_it is a random error term. Estimation of this model of the trend for x provided the following parameters:

α₀ = 1.01_, α₁ = 0.042_; α₂ = –0.002; α₃ = 0.0000261_, R̄² = 0.60; F-statistic = 25.18 (prob = 0.00).

   (8.43)     (1.97)   (–1.61)    (1.92)

This model was also compared with one that assumed α₂ = α₃ = 0. To test the null hypothesis that the variances are the same, an F-statistic was estimated. The F-statistic is 6.33 > F (2,46) = 5.10 at the 1% level of significance which implies that the additional time variables significantly reduce the sum of the squared variances between the actual observations and the estimated trend for the average annual number of authors per paper. We also compared this model with one that assumed α₃ = 0, and found that on the basis of an F-test the addition of the cubic term significantly reduced the variances at the 10% level of significance.

18. Two other women have subsequently published two articles in one issue, Cath Sleeman (2005, Vol. 30, No. 1) and Gail Pacheco (2012, Vol. 46, No. 2). Twenty male authors have published two or more articles in one issue of NZEP. Amongst those 20 authors, two have twice published two or more papers in one issue: Paul Dalziel (1987, 1993) and John Creedy (2005, 2014). Two authors have published 3 papers in the one issue: John McDermott (1990) and Christopher Ball (2014) and one author has published five papers in one issue: John Creedy (2014).

19. An institution's weighted share of author contributions is simply the sum of weighted author articles contributed by authors from that particular institution. In fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and psychology, where there is a tendency to order the authors according to their relative contributions, this approach to weighting would not be appropriate. But this is not a common practice in economics where more often the order is alphabetical without regard to relative contributions.

20. The preferred estimated trend equation for the annual number of weighted female authors in NZEP from 1966 to 2015 is y_t = α₀ + α₁t + ϵ_it where y is weighted female authors and t is the time period for the observed y, α₁ is a constant and ϵ_it is a random error term. Estimation of this model of the trend for y provided the following parameters:

α₀ = –0.13_; α₁ = 0.06_; where R̄² = 0.33; F-statistic = 23.47 (prob = 0.00).

   (–0.41)  (4.84)

This model was compared with alternative trend models that included squared and cubed time variables, but the additional time variables did not significantly reduce the sum of the squared residuals.

21. The chi-square statistic is 10.88 > χ²₁ = 10.83 at the 1% level of significance. The null hypothesis that the male and female frequencies are the same is therefore rejected at the 1% level of significance for a two-tail test.

22. This approach focuses on a randomly selected author and observes whether male or female. If the focus was switched to papers, the difference between male and female would be amplified.

23. As mentioned earlier, this includes a number of comments, replies and introductions to special issues.

24. Contributions from South American institutions have not figured prominently. Total weighted author contributions during the 50 years have been only 2.2. This includes the first paper from South America contributed by Grant Scobie in 1973 (Vol. 7) while he was Director of CIAT in Colombia.

25. ‘Duration’ refers to the number of years between an author's first and last contribution to an article published in NZEP.

26. It is possible to regard internal factors including the sociology of the economics profession but, as mentioned earlier, a narrower view must be taken here. Internal developments are also characterised by what is likely called ‘fashions’ – another aspect which cannot be explored here. Of course in the clothing industry, fashions are deliberately created to be temporary. But in economics, the proponents believe they are creating something of permanent and lasting value.

27. An allusion to the distinction was also made by Friedman (1991) when reviewing the first 100 years of the Economic Journal. Notwithstanding the introduction of new fields of specialisation in economics, Friedman (1991, p. 37) suggested that

there has been little change in the major issues occupying the attention of economists: they are very much the same as those that Adam Smith dealt with more than two centuries ago. Moreover, there has not been a major sea change in our understanding of those issues. We can still read the Wealth of Nations ... with pleasure and intellectual profit. Major improvements have been made in the ‘engine of analysis’ ... as a result, I believe that we have a fuller understanding of the basic economic forces than our predecessors did.

28. Furthermore, changes that began from an external stimulus may subsequently undergo internal developments. For example, challenges initially raised by the introduction of railways actually stimulated many microeconomic and welfare analyses of the so-called marginal economists later in the nineteenth century, which stimulated research in many avenues which may then have the appearance of being internal developments.

29. One referee used the term ‘organisational abolition’ of economic history. Unfortunately, this process cannot be discussed here, though the fate of history of economic analysis similarly warrants further exploration.

30. It is seen in Table 6 that the Global Financial Crisis has stimulated very few papers in this field.

31. This may reflect to some extent the application of techniques to New Zealand data rather than the application of techniques designed specifically to solve a New Zealand ‘problem’.

32. See, for example, http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&q=new+zealand+economic+papers&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp

33. Some people may suggest that this reflects an insular or parochial outlook. However, citations mentioned above suggest that this is not the case.