The Font in Our Stars: Typesetting and Technicality in Economics

Alexander Kindel, Princeton University

The style of written documentation is an important site of conflict within expert fields. Taking elite economists' varied use of typesetting software as an example, this paper shows how such literary "format wars" play out over time. I characterize typesetting variation -- specifically, the use of LaTeX and its distinctive visual style -- by tracing the publication outcomes of thousands of economics working papers released by the National Bureau of Economic Research since the late 1990s. Using a combination of statistical text analysis and causal sensitivity analysis, I show that journal-bound working papers originally typeset using LaTeX are placed in more prestigious venues on average than substantively comparable works typeset using other software. I additionally find that economists are more likely to use LaTeX to typeset manuscripts intended for academic journals than other genres of academic publication (e.g. book chapters). These findings suggest that intramural conflicts over an expert field's evaluative criteria often play out in the messy space between matters of taste and matters of skill.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 265. Fields of Expertise: Structure and Transformation