Section 5
Referee Comments and Responses
This section describes this paper's path through review. We share the substantive parts of editors' reports (with permission), and explain how they shaped our changes to the paper. We tried to use AI to extract and share the substantive content of the referee reports, but the language models would not cooperate.
Editor's comments ()
I have read your fascinating and careful descriptive empirical assessment of the parental socioeconomic backgrounds of Nobel laureates in the sciences, how they have changed over time, and how they differ across geography and for gender. I greatly appreciate the data collection efforts and reasonably concise (and to the point) write-up. I learned from your fun paper on an interesting (and quite elite) population.
But we need to make some tough decisions. And I reluctantly must conclude that there is not a large enough new economics advance here for the QJE. We will need to pass on your submission. I personally think your paper would be great for an outlet such as AER: Insights, RESTAT, or top general science journal such as Science or PNAS.