The Remarkable Growth in Financial Economics, 1974-2020

Academic finance has grown and evolved in the 46 years since the Journal of Financial Economics (JFE) began publishing papers. This paper uses detailed data on the 2,858 papers written by 3,152 different authors published in the JFE from 1974-2019. Cumulatively, these papers have received 278,018 citations from other published papers as reflected in the Social Science Citation Index. Increasing computing power and electronic communication has resulted in trends toward more empirical work, more co-authorship, and more complex papers. Growth in the demand for finance faculty has driven up faculty salaries, and therefore the demand for journal services. Also see the Internet appendix for additional data.