The distinction between the ‘saltwater’ school of economists based at US coastal universities such as Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, and ‘freshwater’-school economists at Chicago, Minnesota, Rochester and other universities was first noted in the 1970s, and apparently it still matters. An economist is 16pc more likely to cite a paper by a colleague in the same cluster than to cite someone in the other group, say Ali Sina Önder of the University of Bayreuth in Germany and Marko Terviö of Aalto University in Finland. The sharpest distinctions between the two schools of thought are found in the subfield of macroeconomics, the researchers say.

(Source: Economic Inquiry)

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, June 29th, 2015

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