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 after many attempts, we could not coax even the best language models to adequately summarize the main ideas.

What we submitted (Aug 22, 2024) Manuscript ↗

Similar to submission 3 to QJE.

Editor's comments (John Friedman, Dec 11, 2024)

R1: Not disclosed

I have now heard back from a knowledgeable referees on your paper, “Access to Opportunity in the Sciences: Evidence from the Nobel Laureates.” Their anonymous referee report is enclosed. I have also read your paper carefully. I apologize for the delays in getting this paper back to you, as we’ve now pushed beyond our goal time of three months.
The referee and I think that intergenerational differences in outcomes among the very higher levels of achievement – particularly in ways that contribute to public goods – are a very important and policy-relevant topic, and that you have put together a very interesting and important set of facts using the Nobel Laureates. I found your analysis of heterogeneity a bit unsatisfying though, given that the links to potential mechanisms are less well fleshed out. And although this is largely a distinct issue about the heterogeneity results, I think this may be important for the headline findings as well. For instance, to what extent should your findings be interpreted more through the lens of parental occupation, rather than income or socioeconomic status?
As R1 notes in the report, I think that your paper falls a bit in a middle ground between what I think would be two more compelling alternatives. One approach would be to tighten up the paper around the core findings, at which point it would be a very good fit for a shorter paper series like American Economic Review: Insights. A different approach would be to really develop the analysis of heterogeneity – for instance across countries or between metro areas. The potential for such a paper would of course depend heavily on the details of this further analysis, but it could well make the paper appropriate for another top general interest journal.
I’m very sorry to say then that, in light of these issues, I have therefore decided to reject your paper.

How we changed the paper

The AER referee and editor suggested a lot of additional analyses that we thought were interesting and reasonable, but they went beyond the goals of our short descriptive paper.

While we knew we could throw more stuff at the wall or do more speculative analysis, we felt like this would make the paper worse overall, as the new analysis would not be at the same quality as the core descriptive results.

Ultimately, we thought the main contributions of the paper were (i) coming up the idea of studying access to opportunity by focusing on the origins of the most elite scientists; (ii) documenting the SES distribution of the laureates as a measure of that access to opportunity; (iii) documenting how it changed over 125 years. Anything else was a distraction.

This said, six journal submissions later, after it was raised by another editor and referee, we did end up adopting one of R1's suggestions here that we study whether parent occupation predicts scientific field, over and above the income and education level of the parent. (It does.)