Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Predicting Honors

In a new NBER working paper, Daniel Hamermesh and Gerard Pfann estimate the probability that an economist will be honored by his peers (by receiving a Nobel Prize, being elected President of the American Economic Association, being named a Distinguished Fellow of the AEA, or winning the AEA's Clark Medal).

The bottom line: An economist's citation ranking is a strong predictor. Given citations, an economist's number of publications has no additional predictive value for whether he will obtain such an honor.

FYI, here is an up-to-date citation ranking of more than 20,000 economists.