A Few Goodmen:

We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus. ∗For invaluable research assistance, we thank Napat Jatusripitak and Carlos Paez, even though their surnames are quite different from ours. Susannah Tobin, no relation to James, thought up the title. We thank Yoram Bauman and four anonymous referees for valuable feedback. We received no support for this research from any source. The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Any errors are Goodman’s. †Corresponding author. 1 The Phenomenon of Coauthorship The phenomenon of coauthorship in the economics profession has been widely explored. Card and DellaVigna (2013), for example, document the fact that the number of authors per economics paper has been steadily growing over time. In the early 1970s, three-fourths of economics articles were single-authored. That fraction dropped to less than one-fourth by 2012. Recent research also points to the importance of how one chooses one’s coauthors. Einav and Yariv (2006) explore “alphabetical discrimination”, the fact that economists with earlier surname initials have greater career success, and argue that this phenomenon is not observed in academic fields where the order of coauthorship is not determined alphabetically. This suggests that, all else equal, a given economist should choose coauthors whose last names fall later in the alphabet than his or her own name.12 Freeman and Huang (2014) document the tendency of academics to coauthor with others of a similar ethnic background and argue that homogeneity among coauthors leads to lower quality papers. We leave it to the reader to determine whether this paper is consistent with that finding. 2 Prior Literature by Surname-Sharing Coauthors Relatively little attention has, however, been paid to the phenomenon of coauthors sharing surnames. The phenomenon is rare but not vanishingly so, for two reasons. First, finding a coauthor within one’s own household or extended family likely has lower costs than finding coauthors elsewhere. Hamermesh and Oster (2002) note that rapidly improving communications technology has lowered the cost of coauthoring with distant researchers, rendering this fact less relevant. They also point out, however, that researchers seem to choose coauthors in part for their consumption value and not just their productivity. In short, family members may want to coauthor simply because they enjoy working together more than with non-family members. Engers et al. (1999) show that alphabetical ordering by surname is actually an equilibrium in a market where participants are interested in evaluating the relative contribution of coauthors. That this paper uses first names to order coauthors suggests the stability of that equilibrium. McNollgast (1990) avoids this ordering challenge by collapsing all coauthors’ surnames into a single surname. For details, see web.stanford.edu/group/mcnollgast/cgi-bin/wordpress/mcnollgast/.