Social Econ Blog

I may be the only one interested in this, but two of my TFs from first year, Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv, have written a paper documenting that economists whose last names are towards the end of the alphabet are less likely to be tenured at top departments, are less likely to be members of the econometrics society, and are less likely to write multi-authored papers. I have long wondered about this stuff (and I figured that someone must have written about it). In economics, the convention is to list authors alphabetically. This means that those of us at the end are frequently not tied to our work (lost into the "et al." abyss or, at the least, an after thought). Interestingly, in psychology, where alphabetical listing is not the convention, they do not find a last name effect.