This New York Times story about SSRN rankings lead me to search for the top-ranked paper by political scientists. Can you guess what it is?
Here it is. If that link is gated for you, go here. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
Its ranking, by the way, is #139, beneath such eye-grabbers as “Understanding Risk and Return, the CAPM, and the Fama-French Three-Factor Model “ (#124) and “Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Risk Transfer” (#68).
This illuminates the bigger problem: political scientists don’t seem to post papers to the SSRN at nearly the rate of economists and lawyers. See the SSRN political science network for an illustration.