THE EDITORS AND AUTHORS OF ECONOMICS JOURNALS: A CASE OF INSTITUTIONAL OLIGOPOLY? Ã Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Harry Rothman This paper examines data on the institutional backgrounds of editors and authors of the top 30 economics journals, identi®ed by their 1995 citation impact. It is revealed, for example, that 70.8% of the journal editors were located in the United States, and twelve U.S. universities accounted for the location of more than 38.9%. Concerning journal article authors, 65.7% were located in U.S. institutions and twelve U.S. universities accounted for 21.8%. Arguably, the degree of institutional and geographical concentration of editors and authors may be unhealthy for innovative research in economics. The number of academic journals in economics is large and increasing rapidly. The Judge Institute (1994) compiled a list of no less than 1,431 journals in management and social science, a large proportion of which were devoted to economic issues. 2 Given this rapidly growing abundance of titles, more and more attention is being devoted to the identi®cation of, and greater relative status bestowed upon, the top 30 or `core' journals in the subject. It is likely that the explosion in the number of journals will lead to much higher relative prestige being bestowed on work published in the perceive `core'. Accordingly, questions of institutional af®liation and control relating to these `core' journals are of major and increasing importance. A list of the 30 most visible and well-known economics journals is compiled here. It is shown that a large number of the editors and authors related to these journals come from a few, predominantly U.S.-based, academic institu- tions. Although the degree of institutional concentration revealed here may be surprising, some might wish to attempt to explain this phenomenon by supposing that (a) the most visible or highly-cited journals are generally the most pres- tigious or highest quality journals, and (b) the institutional concentration of editors and authors is due to the fact that the most prestigious or highest quality scholars are largely concentrated in these few institutions. What is the response to this argument? This essay makes no judgements The Economic Journal, 109 (February), F165±F186. # Royal Economic Society 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. [ F165 ] Ã This work was ®nanced by a generous grant from the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust. The authors also wish to thank Mauro Boianovsky and Robyn May for extensive research assistance on this project. They are also very grateful to Uskali Ma Èki and Philip Mirowski for discussions, and to Timothy Besley and Stephen Machin for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 What constitutes an `economic' issue is both problematic and controversial. Nevertheless, 231 of the 1,431 journals have words based on `econ-' (such as `economics', `economy', `econometric') in their title, and a number of additional journals on this list are widely recognised as being within the `economics' subject area. Copyright © 2000 All Rights Reserved