姓氏和成就的关系.pdfVIP

Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 20, Number 1—Winter 2006—Pages 175–188 What’s in a Surname? The Effects of Surname Initials on Academic Success Liran Einav and Leeat Yariv here is abundant research identifying external characteristics (race, gen- der, adolescent height) that affect labor market outcomes; for recent Tcontributions, see Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) and Persico, Postle- waite and Silverman (2004). In this paper, we focus on the effects of surname initials on professional outcomes in the academic labor market for economists. We begin our analysis with data on faculty in all top 35 U.S. economics departments. Faculty with earlier surname initials are significantly more likely to receive tenure at top ten economics departments, are significantly more likely to become fellows of the Econometric Society, and, to a lesser extent, are more likely to receive the Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize. These statistically significant differences remain the same even after we control for country of origin, ethnicity, religion or departmental fixed effects. All these effects gradually fade as we increase the sample to include our entire set of top 35 departments. We suspect the “alphabetical discrimination” reported in this paper is linked to the norm in the economics profession prescribing alphabetical ordering of credits on coauthored publications. As a test, we replicate our analysis for faculty in the top 35 U.S. psychology departments, for which coauthorships are not normatively ordered alphabetically. We find no relationship between alphabetical placement and tenure status in psychology. We then discuss the extent to which the effects of alphabetical placement are internalized by potential authors in their choices of the number of coauthors as y Liran Einav is Assistant Professor of Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, Californi