Coauthorship and the gender gap in top economics journal publications

ABSTRACT

Coauthorship has become the new norm in academics since the early 1970s because it enhances productivity. However, the gender gap in economics journal publication continues to persist, which explains why there are fewer women than men in the economics profession. This study investigates the role of coauthorship in the gender gap in top economics journals for untenured faculty members in the US. We construct a unique dataset from the CVs of academic economists from the top 96 PhD-granting economics departments in the US. Our results suggest that, compared to men, women are matched with less productive unique coauthors because women begin their academic careers in lower-ranked economics departments than men, which is associated with institutional gender bias. This poor-quality matching can explain approximately 0.60 fewer publications in the top 20 economics journals during the untenured period.

KEYWORDS:

• Unique coauthor
• coauthor publications
• solo publications
• journal ranking
• gender bias

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J16
• J44
• J71

Disclosure statement

We declare that this manuscript is an original research article and we have not received any funding from any organization for this research. The data used in this research are collected by us. Thus, it has no conflict of interest with any individual researcher or research organization.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ In 2017, US News and World Report ranked the top 90 economics departments. However, there were 6 ties; thus, there are 96 top-ranked PhD-granting economics departments.

² RePEc ranking is based on the journals’ impact factor. Another journal list source is Econlit provided by the American Economic Association. However, Econlit does not offer any journal rankings.

³ Note that we also provide a detailed discussion of the descriptive statistics in the Appendix.

⁴ Appendix Table 5 shows that the conditional mean differences in coauthored publications and in the total number of publications are statistically significant for untenured faculty from the top 20 ranked schools for the 2010–2017 period.

⁵ In Appendix Table 3, we show that female economists have fewer journal publications during their PhD programs. Therefore, we use the number of journal publications prior to the first job and all other relevant characteristics of the graduate school as control variables to obtain the results in Table 2.

⁶ Furthermore, in Appendix Table 5, we show that the gender differences in total and coauthored publications have increased in the top 20 schools since 2010.

⁷ Note that in Table 5 the coefficient of the interaction term between the variable female and number of unique coauthors is −0.15 for top 20 journals and −0.09 for 21–80 ranked journals and Appendix Table 2 shows that in the top 20 schools the average number of unique coauthors for females is close to 4. Thus, the total impact of lower-quality coauthors for females is approximately −0.60 (= 4 $\times$ −0.15) in the top 20 and −0.36 (= 4 $\times$ −0.09) in 21–80 ranked journals.