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Categorizing and Ranking Graphs in Economics Research: The American Economic Review over the Last Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Jonathan Schwabish
Jonathan Schwabish*
Affiliation:
Income and Benefits Policy Center, Urban Institute, Washington, DC, USA
*
*Corresponding author: e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

How do economists use graphs, and do they use them well? Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, I provide evidence to these questions by exploring more than 2600 graphs published in the first issue of the American Economic Review from 1911 to 2017. I find that economists use a lot of line charts – more than 80% of the total sample are line charts. I also find that the share of graphs that use data (as opposed to diagrams) fell over the first half of the century and then increased from about the early 1980s to today, correlated with perceived graph quality.

Keywords

American Economic Reviewdata visualizationMechanical TurkA12Y1
Type
Invited Paper
Information
Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 20 - 33
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis

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