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There is a natural curiosity within the economic academic community regarding who are the most frequent contributors to the economic literature. This paper presents an analysis of the top publishers in the ‘Blue Ribbon Eight’ economics journals, over the past 50 years (1954-2003), plus two 25-year subperiods of 1954-1978 and 1979-2003. While it is tempting to use these results to rank economics departments, this paper is meant to be an historical appreciation of these authors and journals and not meant to imply any type of current ranking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the journal of economic literature related to time discounting and time preference in the U.S. It defines intertemporal choices as decisions involving tradeoffs among costs and benefits occurring at different times. In this article, the authors review empirical research on intertemporal choice, and present an overview of recent theoretical formulations. In section 2, the authors review the perspectives on intertemporal choice of John Rae and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economists, and describe how these early perspectives interpreted intertemporal choice as the joint product of many conflicting psychological motives. In section 3, they examine the various assumptions underlying the discounted-utility (DU) model. The remaining sections reviews DU anomalies, the numerous alternative theoretical models and reviews attempts to estimate discount rates.

This paper examines data on the institutional backgrounds of editors and authors of the top 30 economics journals, identified by their 1995 citation impact. It is revealed, for example, that 70.8% of the journal editors were located in the United States, and twelve U.S. universities accounted for the location of more than 38.9%. Concerning journal article authors, 65.7% were located in U.S. institutions and twelve U.S. universities accounted for 21.8%. Arguably, the degree of institutional and geographical concentration of editors and authors may be unhealthy for innovative research in economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]