Editors of academic journals are gate keepers who play a key role in the development of an academic discipline and our understanding of the world. Their decisions also make or break academic careers. In the Brown Bag seminar, I present a number of unique databases dealing with the editorial boards of more than 100 economics journals over 1990-2011. An aim of the project is to answer questions like, What determines who becomes an editor?, What are the effects of becoming an editor on the editor’s academic performance?, and What are the effects on the academic performance of her peers (colleagues, co-authors)? As a prologue, and as a separate project, I present descriptive statistics concerning where editors obtained their training, their affiliation at the time of being an editor, the distribution of editorial decision power, and changes in these dimensions over time.

Co-authors: joint work with Lorenzo Ductor