Revisions and FAQ

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 1, 2025) Manuscript ↗

Our referees at AER:I wanted better justification of our claims about misallocation, and were concerned that we hadn't adequately addressed the genetic factor — the possibility that Nobel laureates come from rich families because cognitive skills are heritable and predict both parent wealth and child success. If this is a major factor, then the correlation of scientific success with childhood wealth is less consequential for scientific productivity. The right people are already becoming scientists.

We added two major features to the version of the paper that we sent to ReStud:

We wrote a model that worked through the role of genetic heritability of cognitive skills, parental investment in education (where rich kids get more investment), and access to careers unrelated to skill (e.g. getting internships from family friends). We thought this model was useful, because it demonstrates that the "lost Einsteins" concern relies on a lot of assumptions that are difficult to test. Working through this model made us less confident about our earlier draft's claims about the misallocation of scientific talent, so we were much more neutral on this subject here, simply pointing out the circumstances where misallocation would or would not be large.
A simulation exploring how much empirical estimates of the genetic heritability of cognitive skills could explain the unequal distribution of Nobel laureate childhood backgrounds. We took heritability estimates from the literature, made assumptions about the share of brilliant people going into scientific research, the correlation between parent income and heritable cognitive skills, etc. Our conclusion: the elite nature of laureate childhoods is hard to explain with genetic factors alone.

This all ended up being a significant detour, as we ended up removing both the model and the simulation when we revised the paper for REStat.

Editor's comments (Oct 6, 2025)

R1: Reject
R2: Reject
R3: Reject
R4: Undecided

I am afraid I have bad news, as following the unanimous recommendation of the reviewing team, I have decided to turn it down.
I sent your paper to four referees as I saw an interesting question and potential. To my regret none ticks <<revise and resubmit>>; three referees tick <<reject>> and one is on the fence (R4), but as you will see from the report even this reviewer is pretty negative.
While all reviewers like the descriptive part of analysis (as I do), they are not convinced that the paper’s marginal contribution is significant enough to warrant publication at a top general interest journal, like the Review of Economic Studies. All reviewers pinpoint to earlier and parallel studies which document the underrepresentation of low socioeconomic background scientists, innovators, professors, star scientists, etc. In addition, none of the referees believes that your paper advances considerably on the mechanisms.
And each of the referees pinpoints a few additional concerns. Ror example, R1, who only sent a letter to me writes that “there are too many issues with the data (measuring background only from US data but for internationals) and not showing whether this concentration actually affects science.” R2 feels that the empirics are not up to the Review’s high standards; R3 feels that the model, while interesting, cannot carry the paper at the Review and does not add much; R4 worries about the relatively small number of observations and the many typos and inconsistencies.
So regretfully we will pass.

How we changed the paper

The referee comments here were reasonable; they parallel our comments at AER:I. The referees were not impressed by either the new model nor the simulation. We were stepping down a journal rank, so we did not significantly change the paper before the next submission.