Using a database of 76,046 empirical economics papers
published between 1985 and 2004 in the top 202
economics journals, the authors report two associations.
First, per-capita research output on a given country
increases with the country’s per capita gross domestic
product (GDP). Regressions controlling for data
availability and quality in the country, indicators of
governance and the use of English yield an estimated
research-GDP elasticity of 0.37; surprisingly, the
United States (US) is not an outlier in the production
of empirical research. Second, papers written about the
US are far more likely to be published in the top five
economics journals, even after the quality of research
has been partially controlled for through fixed-effects
for the authors’ institutional affiliations; the estimates
suggest that papers on the US are 2.6 percentage points
more likely to be published in the top-five journals. This
is a large effect because only 1.5 percent of all papers
written about countries other than the US are published
in the top-five journals. The authors speculate about the
interpretations of these facts, and invite further analysis
and additions to the public release of the database that
accompanies this paper.