Academic Capture

Texas Instruments’ TI-84 calculator has been the standard graphing calculator for American students for twenty years, despite its high cost and lack of innovation. Barak and Eli Orbach explore how Texas Instruments created its entrenched calculator monopoly and the lessons it offers educators as they grapple with the emerging possibilities of artificial intelligence in the classroom.

In new research, Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner ask if academic research exhibits political slants. They develop a new measure of the political slant of research and study how it varies by discipline, demographics, and the political party of the sitting United States president. Finally, they show that their measure is related to the researchers' personal political ideology, suggestive of an ideological echo chamber in social science research.

In a field experiment conducted with economists on Twitter, the authors find that users who are identifiable as white, women, and PhD students affiliated with “top-ten” universities are more likely to receive follow-backs.

In new research, David Audretsch, Christian Fisch, Chiara Franzoni, Paul P. Momtaz, and Silvio Vismara find that the decline of academic freedom over the last decade has had a deleterious impact on innovation, as measured by the quantity and quality of new patents.

That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia. On April 22, Professors Christian Leuz, Anat Admati,...

Following the Uber Files leaks, transportation expert Hubert Horan explains why Uber is “hopelessly uneconomic” and how its engagement with policymakers and academics aided...

The Guardian’s exposé on Uber’s strategy of engaging with top academic researchers to produce corporate-friendly research calls to mind concerns regarding academic lobbying and...

In her bold new book Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be, Cambridge professor Diane Coyle offers a road map...

One objective of political finance is to hold power to account. However, gatekeeping, both direct and indirect, is keeping important work from being conducted...

On Friday, ProMarket published a piece by Renée Adams about the impact of academic gatekeeping in political finance. Do you have a similar story...