Economics Prize Concentration Rises

An analysis of ~6,000 award-winning researchers across 18 fields finds that economics is the only field where prizewinning authorship has become more concentrated at a small set of institutions over recent decades. The authors link this to stronger prestige sorting in economics, low reliance on specialized equipment, and evaluation norms that favor synthetic argument over decisive experiments. — Concentration of prestige in economics matters because it channels which research and policy ideas gain authority, shaping public policy debates and the field’s diversity of perspectives.