High and Rising Institutional Concentration of Award-Winning Economists

We analyze the institutional clustering of award-winning researchers. We collect nearly 300,000 annual education and career affiliations of nearly 6,000 award-winning researchers across 18 major academic fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences. All fields, except for economics, exhibit a low and decreasing concentration, which suggests a trend toward decentralized knowledge production. Conversely, economics shows a high and rising concentration. We investigate potential reasons for this anomaly, including researcher mobility, reliance on physical assets, the age of fields, the role of prestige, and the influence of the United States in shaping disciplinary norms.