Economics Lunchtime Seminar Series. "Cultural Change through Writing Style in the Economics Profession"
Published: 22 April 2025
09 May 2025. Dr Camilo Garcia-Jimeno, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Dr Camilo Garcia-Jimeno, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
"Cultural Change through Writing Style in the Economics Profession"
Friday, 09 May 2025. 13:00-14:00
Room 141A, Adam Smith Business School
Abstract
Through their writing, people reflect their values. Since the 1970s, economists have gradually changed their third-person pronoun choices, from using the masculine form to incorporating feminine and plural forms. We document this transition empirically, and examine the role of social interactions among economists in driving the cultural change reflected in these choices. Our analysis relies on a model where writing style depends on the influence of academic peers, the implicit negotiation between co-authors, and individual authors' preferences for expressing gender-equality values in their writing. We measure peer influence relying on time-varying academic connections between economists, and propose a methodology that uses a homophily-based model of co-authoring decisions to isolate the effect of peer influence from unobserved personal preferences.
The model allows us to decompose the observed changes in writing style over the last 50 years into generational shifts, the increasing prevalence of co-authorship in the profession, the increasing share of female economists, and peer influence. There is overwhelming conformism in the profession: we find positive-signed peer influences for all economists. However, women and more liberal economists are subject to stronger peer influences. Being a growing fraction of the academic community, their entry has made the profession more conformist. While conformism slowed the adoption of innovative writing styles early on, it magnified the effect of external cultural influences in driving the rapid change in writing styles of the last two decades. The overall homophily in co-authoring, which restricts economists' exposure to peers with different gender-attitude signaling preferences, had similar effects.
Bio
JPhD from MIT, currently Senior Economist and Economic Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
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First published: 22 April 2025