IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bon/boncrc/crctr224_2021_308.html

What’s Worth Knowing? Economists’ Opinions About Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Andre

  • Armin Falk

Abstract

We document economists’ opinions about what is worth knowing and ask (i) which research objectives economic research should embrace and (ii) which topics it should study. Almost 10,000 economic researchers from all fields and ranks of the profession participated in our global survey. Detailed bibliometric data show that our sample represents the population of economic researchers who publish in English. We report three main findings. First, economists’ opinions are vastly heterogeneous. Second, most researchers are dissatisfied with the status quo, in terms of both research topics and objectives. Third, on average, respondents think that economic research should become more policy-relevant, multidisciplinary, risky and disruptive, and pursue more diverse topics. We also find that dissatisfaction with the status quo is more prevalent among female scholars and associated with lower job satisfaction and higher stress levels. Taken together, the results suggest that economics as a field does not appreciate and work on what economists collectively prefer.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Andre & Armin Falk, 2021. "What’s Worth Knowing? Economists’ Opinions About Economics," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2021_308, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2021_308
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp308
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ambrocio, Gene & Ferrero, Andrea & Jokivuolle, Esa & Ristolainen, Kim, 2022. "What Should the Inflation Target Be? Views from 600 Economists," CEPR Discussion Papers 17289, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Felix Chopra & Ingar Haaland & Christopher Roth & Andreas Stegmann, 2024. "The Null Result Penalty," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 134(657), pages 193-219.
    3. Drews, Stefan & Savin, Ivan & van den Bergh, Jeroen, 2024. "A Global Survey of Scientific Consensus and Controversy on Instruments of Climate Policy," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 218(C).
    4. Arne Heise, 2023. "'We need to offer something better to the scholars of the future.' Which way forward for heterodox economics?," The Journal of Philosophical Economics, Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, The Journal of Philosophical Economics, vol. 16(1), pages 130-161, Annual.
    5. El Tinay, Hassan & Schor, Juliet B., 2025. "Do economists think about climate change and inequality? Semantic analysis and topic modeling of top five economics journals," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 232(C).
    6. Shelly Lundberg, 2023. "Gender Economics: Dead-Ends and New Opportunities," Research in Labor Economics, in: 50th Celebratory Volume, volume 50, pages 151-189, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • A11 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Role of Economics; Role of Economists
    • A14 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Sociology of Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2021_308. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CRC Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.crctr224.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.