The Impact of Nobel Prize Winners in Economics: Mainline vs. Mainstream

Abstract

We assess the impact of two groups of economists; mainline economists, who regard economics primarily as the science of exchange and mainstream economists, who perceive economics primarily as the science of choice. To control for scholarly quality we investigate the citation impact of Nobel Prize winning economists, who we break up into the two groups, mainline and mainstream. We find that over the period from 1970 to 2007 mainline economists had more of an impact than mainstream economists.

Keywords: citations, SSCI, Nobel Prize in economics, mainstream, mainline

JEL Classification: A11, B20, N01