Oldies but Goldies! Twenty Years After, the Journal of Sports Economics at a Crossroads?

The present article first delineates core sport economics and compares the content of the Journal of Sports Economics (JSE) in different periods of time, then with other core publications in sport economics. Finally, a comparison is undertaken with articles in sport economics which have been published in generalist economics journals over the past two decades. A major conclusion is that the JSE appears to be the mainstream journal in quantitative sport microeconomics. Other strengths and weaknesses are exhibited and tentatively explained, including a marginal attention paid to non-microeconomic issues in sport and some other unheeded topics. A final conclusion is geared toward options for the editorial policy in the decades to come.

Gender distribution across topics in the top five economics journals: a machine learning approach

We analyze text data in all the articles published in the top five (T5) economics journals between 2002 and 2019 in order to find gender differences in their research approach. We implement an unsupervised machine learning algorithm: the structural topic model (STM), so as to incorporate gender document-level meta-data into a probabilistic text model. This algorithm characterizes jointly the set of latent topics that best fits our data (the set of abstracts) and how the documents/abstracts are allocated to each topic. Latent topics are mixtures over words where each word has a probability of belonging to a topic after controlling by journal name and publication year (the meta-data). Thus, the topics may capture research fields but also other more subtle characteristics related to the way in which the articles are written. We find that females are unevenly distributed over the estimated latent topics. This and other findings rely on “automatically” generated built-in data given the contents in the abstracts of the articles in the T5 journals, without any arbitrary allocation of texts to particular categories (as JEL codes, or research areas).

Who’s talking to whom in agribusiness? And should anyone listen? The network of intellectual influence in agribusiness research

PurposeTo develop an understanding of communication among agribusiness journals and to examine patterns of citations that allow the measurement and description of the structure of communication flows among those journals in a network.Design/methodology/approachThe data for this study were gathered from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) published by Thomson Scientific (Philadelphia). The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis, based on an international trade analogy to explain the network of agribusiness journals and how these journals communicate with business and economics journals.FindingsBusiness and economics journals and, particularly the traditionally major ones, surprisingly were scarcely every used. However, the British Food Journal stood out with 50 citations to marketing and strategic management journals.Research limitations/implicationsThere are predominantly four such limitations: only 33 journals were studied, only one 5-year time period was involved, that time period is a few years old and the journal characteristics were derived using data from the “Scopes” and “Information for Authors” text on the website of each journal.Practical implicationsExchanges of agribusiness knowledge and information among diverse stakeholders (consumers, suppliers and public agencies) in a complex environment require a better understanding of the network of agribusiness journals and their relation to traditional business and economics journals.Social implicationsNetworks of journals facilitate cooperation and interactions to improve developments in the field.Originality/valueExamining citations from and to the field of agribusiness is interesting and important because knowledge is transferred through networks comprise those who contribute to journals, read them and learn from them, i.e. by “talking” to each other as well as by practitioners who also read and learn from those journals.

Bibliometric study on asset pricing

Purpose This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of asset pricing research and identifies the general research trends in the area. The study also aims to provide future direction to the researchers in the area of asset pricing. Design/methodology/approach The study uses bibliometric analysis techniques to achieve the stated purpose. The study covers 3,007 articles published in the top 50 finance and economics journals, accessed from the Scopus database for a period of 47 years (1973–2020). After initial searching for “asset pricing” as the main keyword in “title, abstract, keywords”, the database yields 6,583 articles. This number further reduces to 3,007 articles when the search is restricted to research and review articles published in the top 50 peer-reviewed journals. Findings The tabular and pictorial representation obtained from the analysis exhibit that asset pricing is an extensively researched area; however, a sudden rise in the number of publications (242) observed for 2019 demonstrates a growing interest amongst researchers. Further, affiliation statistics indicate that the volume of research is mainly concentrated in the USA and other developed nations; hence it opens vistas for the exploration of risk-return dynamics in the context of emerging markets. Originality/value The work presents an exhaustive and comprehensive review along with potential research implications. The present study reconciles various contradictory views of the prior studies under asset pricing such as risk-return trade-off, low-risk anomaly and provides the researchers with potential research gaps.

Environmental Economics of Pollination

The pollination of crops by domesticated bees and wild pollinators is easily and often imagined as an accidental but essential process in agriculture. The notion that pollinators are overlooked despite their essential role in food production is widespread among the general public, as well as in policy debates concerning all issues related to pollinators, ranging from regulation of pesticides to conservation of habitat for wild bees, to support of beekeeping as an industry or as a hobby. Meade was the first to formalize this notion by making pollination a canonical example of beneficial externality in economics and arguing that subsidies should be established to ensure that honeybees are provided in optimal numbers to pollinate crops. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the same argument, but this time focusing on wild pollinators, has been proposed and supported by a large and growing literature in conservation ecology. However, a thorough review of contributions on the economics of pollination reveals several misconceptions behind the appealing fable of pollination externalities. The most striking rebuttal of Meade’s argument comes from the study of pollination markets, where beekeepers and crop growers engage in voluntary transactions called pollination contracts. A small economics literature formalizes the issue of incentives solved by these transactions and provides a detailed empirical analysis of many complex aspects, such as the establishment of standards for the monitoring of bee densities or the impact of seasonality of blooms and bee population dynamics on pollination prices. Outside pollination markets, economists have made rather sparse and partial contributions to several other important issues related to pollination in agriculture, such as valuation of pollination services, conservation of wild pollinators, and regulation of pesticides that impact pollinators. On these topics, studies have largely been published in non-economics journals and economists stand to make valuable contributions by applying and popularizing the concepts of incentive design, information costs, and other key insights of environmental economics in the study of pollination.

Dawning of a new age? Economics journals’ data policies on the test bench

In the field of social sciences and particularly in economics, studies have frequently reported a lack of reproducibility of published research. Most often, this is due to the unavailability of data reproducing the findings of a study. However, over the past years, debates on open science practices and reproducible research have become stronger and louder among research funders, learned societies, and research organisations. Many of these have started to implement data policies to overcome these shortcomings. Against this background, the article asks if there have been changes in the way economics journals handle data and other materials that are crucial to reproduce the findings of empirical articles. For this purpose, all journals listed in the Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports edition for economics have been evaluated for policies on the disclosure of research data. The article describes the characteristics of these data policies and explicates their requirements. Moreover, it compares the current findings with the situation some years ago. The results show significant changes in the way journals handle data in the publication process. Research libraries can use the findings of this study for their advisory activities to best support researchers in submitting and providing data as required by journals.