Saturday, January 03, 2009

Economics Text Analysis



Interesting word clouds generated by Paul Kedrosky based on session and paper titles from the American Economic Association meeting. I've only been to this conference twice - the first time because I was getting interviewed for jobs and the second because I was interviewing candidates. I maybe went to one session. It really isn't very interesting to me at all. The AEA is very undemocratic and each year's conference program is designed by the current year's President. So it might not be very representative of economics as a whole. All papers must be submitted way way in advance. You have very little chance of getting your paper onto the program unless you are part of an organized session and preferably one invited in advance by the President. This is diametrically opposed to say the Association of American Geographers where every submitted paper is accepted. The majority of people at the AEA meeting are there for job markets reasons in my impression. As the AAG meeting takes place in April it is too late for the North American academic job market which is extremely cyclical. Most decisions for the following year are made by March or April.

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