Reputation and economist’s salaries

Daniel Hamermesh has a new paper on the impact of reputation in salaries. This is part of his “crusade” to understand the dynamics of the profession (Hamermesh et al, 1982; Hamermesh 1992;  Hamermesh and Schmidt, 2003; among others).

 The study finds that, as expected, having more scholars interested in the research of the economist increases both the reputation and the salary. But, contrary to what we might have expected and controlling for attention, writing more papers increases salaries BUT reduces reputation.

This may suggest that if reputation is what you want, writing a lot of papers is not going to help. Instead, it will help you to change jobs and increase your salary.  It is easy to understand why reputation increases with quality and not with quantity but why the market (or the economic departments) is rewarding just quantity instead of relying in a variable that is very easy to observe like reputation???

Given that citation is great predictor of reputation here is the citation ranking. Once again Shleifer is unbelievable and top 10 with the exceptions of Shleifer and Heckman are very macro-oriented.