The use of mathematics in economics and its effect on a scholar's academic career

Espinosa, Miguel and Rondon, Carlos and Romero, Mauricio (2012): The use of mathematics in economics and its effect on a scholar's academic career.

Abstract

There has been so much debate on the increasing use of formal mathematical methods in Economics. Although there are some studies tackling these issues, those use either a little amount of papers, a small amount of scholars or cover a short period of time. We try to overcome these challenges constructing a database characterizing the main socio demographic and academic output of a survey of 438 scholars divided into three groups: Economics Nobel Prize winners; scholars awarded with at least one of six prestigious recognitions in Economics; and academic faculty randomly selected from the top twenty Economics departments worldwide. Our results provide concrete measures of mathematization in Economics by giving statistical evidence on the increasing trend of number of equations and econometric outputs per article. We also show that for each of these variables there have been four structural breaks and three of them have been increasing ones. Furthermore, we found that the training and use of mathematics has a positive correlation with the probability of winning a Nobel Prize in certain cases. It also appears that being an empirical researcher as measured by the average number of econometrics outputs per paper has a negative correlation with someone's academic career success.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Nobel Prize, Mathematics, Economics, Reputation
• Subjects: N - Economic History > N0 - General > N01 - Development of the Discipline: Historiographical; Sources and Methods; B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B3 - History of Economic Thought: Individuals; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C1 - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General > C14 - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods: General; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C8 - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology ; Computer Programs > C81 - Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data ; Data Access

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