I always had the sense that some countries are underrepresented in economics research, but never knew how much. Here are some pretty stark statistics about NBER working papers. 1/3 
What places do we deem important? Who do we deem worth our time and attention? I'd be shocked if this doesn't matter. 2/3
nber.org/papers?page=1&… - all errors/typos my own. 3/3
Thanks to everyone who showed interest in this table! Let me answer a few common questions here.
1) Why NBER working papers? Isn't that a non-representative subset of economics research? // Absolutely it is. I first started making this table in 1/5
1) Why NBER working papers? Isn't that a non-representative subset of economics research? // Absolutely it is. I first started making this table in 1/5
preparation to be an NBER discussant; plus, it is a key organization in the economics community. But I agree that other samples would be fascinating: AEA pubs, BREAD-affiliated papers, etc. Maybe I'll follow up with some of these later on. 2/5
2) What are hits? // These are the number of working papers returned when I enter the search term. The NBER website scans titles and keywords for matches. 3/5
3) Aren't these numbers due to the availability of high-quality data in the UK and Nordics? // Data availability and quality partly generate these patterns. Of course. But is this really the distribution you would choose, if the goal is to understand the world? 4/5
4) Why did I omit [country X]? // I chose these countries without any particular systematic criteria, except that I wanted some representation from each continent. Given the interest, I may follow up with more scientific samples...
Thanks, everyone for reading! 5/5
Thanks, everyone for reading! 5/5
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