To bolster your comment, let me add that Economics as a field is particularly corrupt with regards to how much the reputation of your institution counts for jobs&#x2F;publications. For example, the leading journal of economics that is &quot;Quarterly Journal of Economics&quot; has 50% of it&#x27;s articles only from Harvard and MIT. That means 2 schools out of the hundreds who do economics dominate the leading journal. Although Harvard+MIT are good, by no means are they THAT much better over Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton etc. It is obvious that the reviewers are accepting their own people (QJE is a Harvard journal) over other people.<p>The comparable figure for Physics is something like the top 100-odd schools produce the half of the research. That seems like a much fairer distribution.<p>Take the inherent fuzziness of social science research, compound it with prestige gaming, compound with the impossibility of reporting a negative result, and what you get is shoddy research.