Collaborations and Market Efficiency

This chapter shows quantitative data on the development of collaboration in financial economics and its relationship with success in the field, thereby reconstructing the structure of the network that reasonableness and simplicity helped bring together. It emphasizes that financial economists tended to collaborate with the same people, repeatedly. They worked in small groups and, as a result, participated in an economy of affect in order to repurpose a term from Lorraine Daston that privileged the communicability and interdependence of their findings rather than their precision or accuracy as the centrality of data to what they did might suggest. The network of financial economics came to value communicability and interdependence along with reasonableness. The chapter uses a dataset of study papers, as well as bibliometric and network data to present systematic, quantitative evidence about the kind of social structure that sustained the affective dispositions.

How Financial Economics Got Its Science

This chapter divides the scientific status of the discipline into two empirical questions concerning the degree to which finance is scientific and the kind of science financial economists pursue. Focusing on articles published in the Journal of Finance between 1950 and 2000, the chapter investigates the forms and practices financial economists came to rely on to communicate their results to one another. It also documents the ways in which financial economics changed as mathematics and statistics became dominant, and how mathematics and statistics changed the affective dispositions of financial economists. The chapter analyzes how financial scholars used specific communicative practices and inscription devices as a function of how they conceptualized expertise. It draws the more general lesson that techniques of quantitative analysis are no substitute for relationships of trust among knowledge producers, while pointing to the limited role numbers play in the construction of social knowledge when they are not backed by social relationships.