TY  - JOUR
AU  - Aizenman,Joshua
AU  - Kletzer,Kenneth
TI  - The Life Cycle of Scholars and Papers in Economics -- the "Citation Death Tax"
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13891
PY  - 2008
Y2  - March 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13891
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13891.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Joshua Aizenman
Economics and SIR
USC
University Park
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0043
Tel: 213-740-4066
E-Mail: aizenman@usc.edu

Kenneth Kletzer
University of California, Santa Cruz
Department of Economics
217 Social Sciences 1
Santa Cruz, CA  95064
Tel: 408-459-3407
E-Mail: kkletzer@cats.ucsc.edu
AB  - The information content of academic citations is subject to debate. This paper views premature death as a tragic "natural experiment," outlining a methodology identifying the "citation death tax" -- the impact of death of productive economists on the patterns of their citations. We rely on a sample of 428 papers written by 16 well known economists who died well before retirement, during the period of 1975- 97. The news is mixed: for half of the sample, we identify a large and significant "citation death tax" for the average paper written by these scholars. For these authors, the estimated average missing citations per paper attributed to premature death ranges from 40% to 140% (the overall average is about 90%), and the annual costs of lost citations per paper are in the range 3% and 14%. Hence, a paper written ten years before the author’s death avoids a citation cost that varies between 30% and 140%. For the other half of the sample, there is no citation death tax; and for two Nobel Prize-caliber scholars in this second group, Black and Tversky, citations took off overtime, reflecting the growing recognitions of their seminal works.
ER  -