Today is that annual event where econ world goes into huge frenzy. The 2012 Economics Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel to be announced today. Who would it be this time?
Meanwhile, a nice paper by the trio Miguel Espinosa, Carlos Rondon and Mauricio Romero (HT: MR Blog). They look at whether know-how of math helps boost your career prospects as an econ. Well the answer is offcourse it does. Infact it boosts your prospects for winning the coveted prize. This is a well-known fact that economics has been mostly knowing math/stats for a while and the trend was rising. May be this crisis has halted the rise but not sure whether the halt will be sustainable.
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.
Known findings. Empirically proven..
Mostly Economics 
October 15, 2012 at 7:28 pm
The first time a controversy was raised goes back to 1979 when
Professot Theodore w Schultz and Professor Arthur Lewis shared
the Nobel Prize even though their thories were poles apart.The
Nobel Committee of Oslo has always provided its own arguments
whenever a polemic arises,for instance,Norman Borlaug,an agrono-
mist from the US got the Nobel Peace Prize while his main contribution was in biotechnology ,not in human rights,the same was
noted when the economist,Muhammad Yuhus,from Bengladesh did
win the Nobel Peace Prize,due to his contributions to”microfinance”
or”microcredit”along with the”Grameen Bank”‘Bank of the Poor).
October 16, 2012 at 3:04 am
interesting paper indeed
October 17, 2012 at 12:42 pm
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