This is a collection of points and thoughts about ethics in academic economics and finance.

(Lack of) Ethics in Academia and Finance

  • I am appalled but not surprised by the behavior of banks, politicians, and many economists. Here are my opinions on the economics profession and ethics, and a clip from youtube. There is also The Wall Street Money Machine.
  • A more lighthearted perspective is South Park: How Banks Work.
  • The most realistic movie about Wall Street is Margin Call—wrinkles and all.
  • Steven Brill's Time Magazine piece about health care costs deserves to be read. It describes the predatory billing practices of our so-called non-profit hospitals for the poor non-insured. They are morally offensive. (My guess but not knowledge is that UCLA Hospital is one of them.)
  • Finance scholars' citation impacts. The intent and collection protocol are described here. A first version of the data is here. Note that I only helped doing this for AFA members. Join the AFA if you want to be on the next list.

    Important: Do not consider any of these numbers to be exact. There are problems in data collection and problems in interpretation of what the measures mean. Read the data collection protocol. And, again, if you are not an AFA member, you are not in here. In my view, you should only consider these statistics in logs, after some basic sanity checks (e.g., authors with similar or changed names that may have been counted incorrectly), and adjusting for subarea and/or coauthorships. However, judging the impact of researchers looking at these flawed numbers, too, is IMHO fairer than basing it on "impression" and "professional networks" alone.