Economics: An Emerging Small World

We study the evolution of social distance among economists over the period 1970–2000. While the number of economists has more than doubled, the distance between them, which was already small, has declined significantly. The key to understanding the short average distances is the observation that eco...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of political economy 2006-04, Vol.114 (2), p.403-412
Main Authors: Goyal, Sanjeev, van der Leij, Marco J., Moraga‐González, José Luis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arithmetic mean
Co authorship
Coefficients
Collaboration
Demographic economics
Deregulation
Economic research
Economic theory
Economists
Information and communication technologies
Joint authorship
Means of transport
Network economies
Political economy
Research coordination
Research workers
Scholarly publishing
Social interaction
Socioeconomics
Space
Statistical variance
Studies
Technological change
Trends
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Summary:We study the evolution of social distance among economists over the period 1970–2000. While the number of economists has more than doubled, the distance between them, which was already small, has declined significantly. The key to understanding the short average distances is the observation that economics is spanned by a collection of interlinked stars. A star is an economist who writes with many other economists, most of whom have few coauthors and generally do not write with each other.
ISSN:0022-3808
1537-534X
DOI:10.1086/500990