What Do We Know About Ourselves? On the Economics of Economics

Since quite some time, economists have been aware of the fact that also the behavior of economists generates questions that need to be answered. Why, for example, do economists use an alphabetic ordering of names when they co-author an article? And what determines the success of an academic economist? Or, how does studying economics affect behavior? At the same time, economists have also noticed that the economics profession generates data that can be used to test theoretical ideas proposed by economists. In this paper, the author gives an overview of such research that takes economists and their behavior as a subject of study. He will focus on three topics: the education of economists, the publication habits of economists and the labor market of economists.

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