Judging from data tracking faculty hiring networks at American universities, economics is one of the hardest disciplines for upward mobility.

Every year during Nobel season, the economics prize is the grand finale. This year's award will be announced on the afternoon of October 12, Beijing time.

Leafing through more than half a century of Nobel laureate rosters, there is a rarely noticed contrast. Among winners of the physics, chemistry, and medicine prizes, only twenty to thirty percent were affiliated at the time of their award with the top ten universities producing the most Nobel laureates in their own discipline, while over seventy percent came from outside that group. Economics is the exact opposite: nearly sixty percent of laureates were at those ten elite schools when they won. Stretching the view across an entire career, the gap becomes even more striking. Half of the working years of economics laureates are concentrated at eight universities, including Harvard, Chicago, and MIT.

Higher education is expanding globally, and knowledge production is becoming ever more international, so the scientific frontier should by rights be more dispersed. Yet a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper by Harvard University's Richard B. Freeman, Tsinghua University's Xie Danxia, and other scholars, titled "The Institutional Concentration of Award-Winning Economists Remains High and Continues to Rise," tracked nearly two centuries of data across 18 disciplines and found that laureates in 17 of them have become increasingly dispersed, with only economics moving in reverse to become the most concentrated discipline of all.

Why do the best people always gather in the best places? Is this extremely closed "academic elite club" an objective law of knowledge production, or a hidden closed loop of academic privilege?

As a co-initiator of the research, Xie Danxia, doctoral supervisor in economics at Tsinghua University's School of Social Sciences and director of the Center for Human-Centered Health and Economic Development, unpacked the four reasons behind this in an exclusive interview.

Concentration Surging Against the Trend

The paper reviewed 171 international authoritative awards across 18 disciplines, tracking the complete career trajectories of nearly 6,000 laureates from their studies to their appointments, spanning from the 19th century to the 2020s. The tool used to measure concentration is the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), commonly used in antitrust review, where a higher value indicates greater concentration. Measured by the number of years laureates spent at institutions over their entire careers, economics had a concentration (HHI) of 257 in 1960, ranking ninth out of 18 disciplines, placing it in the middle of the pack. Over the following half century, most other disciplines became increasingly dispersed: physics fell from 136 to 112, mathematics from 331 to 222, and political science, sociology, and law all dropped to around 100. Only economics rose in the opposite direction, climbing to 387 by 2022 and ranking first. If one uses the Gini coefficient, which economists habitually use to measure wealth inequality, this polarization is even more evident. The Gini coefficient of the distribution of economics laureates' institutions over their full careers is as high as 0.812. More vividly, among the 249 universities and research institutions worldwide that have produced award-winning scholars, just eight institutions—Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University—account for fully 50 percent of all economics laureates' academic working years.

According to the historical trajectory curves drawn in the paper, Xie Danxia noted that from 1990 to 2010 the slope of economics concentration showed a nearly steep climb. In the first six years of the 1990s, five of the Nobel economics prizes included scholars from the University of Chicago. This period of ascent coincided exactly with the golden age of the Chicago School. Xie Danxia stressed, however, that this cannot simply be attributed to the victory of a certain ideology, but rather more to methodological breakthroughs. Gary Becker, who won in 1992, extended optimization analysis to the family, crime, and fertility; Robert Fogel, who took the prize in 1993, rewrote economic history using econometric methods. These achievements were the result of long-term cultivation by Chicago scholars.

No Laboratories, and No "Single Decisive Verdict"

Along with the global expansion of higher education and the rise of internet collaboration, the natural sciences have steadily moved toward "decentralization," while economics has moved in reverse toward greater concentration. In comparing the natural sciences and engineering disciplines, the paper first turns its gaze to the "paradox" between physical capital and mobility costs. Intuitively, the freer the flow of people, the more dispersed resources should be. But Xie Danxia says reality is exactly the opposite, because the "knowledge production function" differs across disciplines. Physics, chemistry, and the life sciences are highly dependent on heavy assets and specialized instruments, from polar detection arrays to massive synchrotron light sources and particle accelerators, often requiring entire laboratory buildings and enormous funding to support. These physical assets naturally create high barriers to talent migration. Xie Danxia said: "Even a top school with deep pockets like Harvard would find it hard, in a city where land is worth its weight in gold, to replicate an expensive laboratory overnight just to poach a scholar." By contrast, economists' knowledge production is completely different, with extremely low dependence on physical capital; their core assets are highly condensed in the scholar's brain, and a desk and a computer are enough to get to work. The paper's empirical tracking confirms that economics has the highest scholar mobility rate among all research categories, with job-hopping frequency before winning major awards significantly overwhelming that of experiment-dependent disciplines. Xie Danxia said that precisely because knowledge production is not bound to land and heavy instruments, the cost for top schools to "cream off" talent is negligible.

Another deep watershed lies in the mode of validating results. In the hard sciences and mathematics, breakthrough contributions often manifest as a "single testable finding." Xie Danxia cited the example of mathematician Zhang Yitang, who drifted on the margins of the academic system for a long time and worked in a fast-food restaurant before making his major breakthrough on the twin prime conjecture. Australian physician Barry Marshall was obscure at the time and, to prove that bacteria cause stomach ulcers, personally drank a culture containing the bacteria. But as long as the derivation holds and the experiment is reproducible, the results were ultimately recognized and won major awards. Yet the object of economic research is the extremely complex human social network, where a "decisive" judgmental experiment is very hard to have. After using large language models to systematically classify the text of official Nobel Prize citations, the paper found that among economics laureates, as many as 55 percent won on the basis of "broad-spectrum systematic work" built up through multiple papers over long years, while "single testable findings" accounted for less than half and were more often awarded for theoretical, econometric, and methodological work. "The natural sciences can have the legend of Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao, who in their early thirties overturned experiments through symmetry and won the Nobel Prize at lightning speed, but economics can never do that," Xie Danxia reflected. "Macroeconomic variables often produce only one data point a year, and whether a growth theory is solid often requires decades of repeated sedimentation of real historical data." When a hypothesis cannot be thoroughly confirmed or refuted by objective experiments in the short term, its affirmation depends heavily on the "disciplinary consensus of the community of economists." Therefore, institutional prestige, mentor networks, and the endorsement of academic authorities inevitably become key substitute signals of quality.

Why Economists All Crowd into a Few Schools

Yet as social sciences, sociology, political science, and law likewise do not require heavy assets for knowledge production, and likewise rely on evidence derived over long cycles, the award concentration in these disciplines has not risen but fallen. In response, Xie Danxia mentioned the third mechanism analyzed in the paper, namely that economics, within the entire spectrum of social sciences, possesses a uniquely "highly unified paradigm" and an extremely strict monopoly on publication review. In sociology or political science, the academic ecosystem allows multiple schools to coexist, even to clash head-on over assumptions about human nature. Even without publishing in core journals, a scholar can establish a foothold by deep fieldwork and publishing an insightful monograph, and major book awards likewise recognize such contributions. But modern economics pursues universal laws to an extreme degree, converging all questions into standard frameworks such as optimization, prices, and equilibrium. Xie Danxia said: "There is no so-called 'Indian economics' or 'Mauritian economics' in the economics community; academia only recognizes economics that holds true everywhere." Scholars must distill mechanisms from phenomena that hold universally in order to gain mainstream recognition. A unified paradigm also makes the "exit" for results very narrow. Economics relies heavily on five top journals, such as the American Economic Review (AER) and the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE). These journals are closely tied to elite schools, even showing a "home-field phenomenon": research cited in the paper shows that between 2000 and 2016, about a quarter of QJE articles came from Harvard authors, and about 14 percent from MIT authors; about 14 percent of articles in the Journal of Political Economy came from University of Chicago authors.

This pattern is also visible in the faculty job market. Using data on American university faculty hiring networks, the research team found that economics is one of the hardest disciplines for upward mobility, with only about 6 percent of faculty employed at institutions ranked higher than their doctoral alma mater, while the proportion of lateral moves is as high as 91 percent, and "downward placement" is only 3 percent. By comparison, the downward mobility rate in other social science disciplines is above 60 percent. Xie Danxia further noted that this closed loop is forged from the very starting point of a scholar's academic career. The paper's statistics on laureates show that the concentration of doctoral degree-granting institutions is even significantly higher than the concentration of the institutions where they worked when they won the prize. At the same time, the top ten economics departments in the United States are also the most picky and concentrated among all disciplines regarding the doctoral origins of their faculty, with the HHI index of their faculty sources approaching 780. In Xie Danxia's view, lacking "hard constraints" such as experiments, "mentor lineages" and alma mater endorsements become a scholar's lifelong credit assets.

Antitrust Reflections and the Shift of Gravity Eastward

Xie Danxia has long studied antitrust and law and economics, and once half-jokingly wanted to title this research "Should Economics Be Subject to Antitrust?" But he also said whether this concentration harms the discipline's allocative efficiency is currently "undecided" in academia. His concern is that when an entire discipline overly embraces the same mainstream theory, it becomes extraordinarily difficult for disruptive, non-mainstream explorations to squeeze into top journals. Still, Xie Danxia is relatively optimistic about the future, believing the current concentration is not insurmountable. He said the discursive power dominated by elite American and European schools over the past century was essentially built on the size of the American economy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain held world economic hegemony, and the top global venue for economics was the Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society. He believes that economics pursues universal laws, and when a country becomes the center of the world economy, its operating logic will be anchored by academia as the "global standard economic sample." He predicts that as China establishes itself as the world's largest economy in the future, "if global scholars try to explore the general laws of the modern economy, the Chinese experience will become an unavoidable required sample and core benchmark," and the academic center of gravity of global economics "will inevitably undergo a profound 'shift eastward.'" As the new Nobel economics prize is about to be announced, Xie Danxia also offered his own unique judgment on the frontier trends. He analyzed that Nobel selection follows a pattern of "field rotation" over long cycles, and modern economics can be divided into three pillars: microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometric methods. Since the 2025 prize has already been awarded in the macro field, the new prize is relatively more likely to tilt toward microeconomics or econometric empirical methods. Under this logic, figures such as Susan Athey, who delved early into microeconomic mechanism design and in recent years has made pioneering contributions at the intersection of machine learning and causal inference, or MIT professor David Autor, who very early systematically quantified the skill-biased impact of automation and artificial intelligence on the labor market, are highly competitive candidates.