Economics is well known to be an 'old boys' club'. Any doubt about that should be dispelled by looking at the list of past Nobel Prize winners (with apologies to Ostrom, Duflo, and Goldin). The main things that past winners have in common are past presidency of either the American Economic Association or the Econometric Society, and/or current or past affiliations to Harvard, MIT, or Chicago.
The extent of the 'old boys' club' within the American Economic Association (AEA) is laid bare in this 2023 article by Kevin Hoover (Duke University) and Andrej Svorenčík (University of Pennsylvania), published in the Journal of Economic Literature (ungated earlier version here). Somewhat ironically (given the topic of the paper), the JEL is one of the journals published by the AEA.
Hoover and Svorenčík start by drawing from the Professional Climate Survey of the AEA in 2019:
The report reveals that the feeling that the AEA leadership is insular and disconnected from the membership is a widely held view, but it is mainly impressionistic. Our goal is to go beyond impressions and to carefully document and analyze the hierarchical structure of the leadership of the AEA and how it has changed over time.
Hoover and Svorenčík document this using data on the executive leadership of the AEA (made up of the Executive Committee, as well as the Nominating Committee that determines nominations for the Executive Committee), covering the period from 1950 to 2019. They focus on:
...the university at which an AEA leader or losing candidate received his or her highest academic degree (typically doctorates) and his or her places of employment (academic or nonacademic) at the time of appointment or of standing for election (win or lose).
The education of the executive leadership of the AEA is summarised in Figure 2 from the paper:
There are several things to note from this figure, including the sheer dominance of a small number of institutions (Harvard, MIT, Chicago, and Stanford), as well as the rise of MIT (and Stanford) and the relative decline of Chicago. There is more diversity of institution apparent in the employment data, as shown in Figure 3 from the paper:
Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Chicago are joined by Princeton, but together they make up nearly half of the executive leadership in the more recent years. This concentration has grown substantially over time (in contrast to educational concentration, which in comparison has grown more slowly over time).
Hoover and Svorenčík then conduct some further analyses, trying to tease out the mechanisms underlying this increasing concentration. Those analyses are less robust, but point towards privilege over merit. They conclude by saying:
What, in the end, have we learned about who runs the AEA? The most obvious lessons are, perhaps, hardly surprising: the AEA leadership is overwhelmingly drawn from a small group of elite, private research universities—in the sense that its leaders were educated at these universities and, to a lesser degree, employed by them. What is less well-known is that for much of the past 70 years, the AEA leadership has been drawn predominantly from just three universities—Harvard, MIT, and Chicago. The leadership is spread more widely among places of employment; but, here too, a small number of institutions dominate... the pattern has become more pronounced through time: even within the group of elite universities, the top group has become more important and the bottom group less so... The vast majority of American universities with graduate programs and employers of economists other than elite universities have, at best, enjoyed token representation among the leadership.
Finally, Hoover and Svorenčík make several suggestions for reform:
Our research suggests that democratization of the AEA leadership would probably require structural changes. In particular, measures that would break the dynamic of network formation would be necessary. Key points of leverage would be arrangements that forced the Executive Committee to be drawn from a broader spectrum of institutions and the establishment of a Nominating Committee with greater independence from the incumbent leadership. In particular abandoning the practices of having past Presidents serve as Chairs of the Nominating Committee and of requiring the slate of candidates to be approved jointly by the Nominating and Executive Committees would help to decouple nominations from the existing structure of the leadership...
I'm not well placed to comment on the specifics of their suggested reforms. However, anything that reduces the power and influence of the 'old boys' club', and opens the leadership to a greater diversity of members, would likely be a good thing.
[HT: This 2023 article in Slate]
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