Do economists think about climate change and inequality? Semantic analysis and topic modeling of top five economics journals

Abstract

While there has been a call for economics to engage with the challenges of climate change, many have voiced concerns that the discipline has failed to seriously deal with the relationship between climate change and inequality. In this paper, we use computational methods – including bibliometric analysis, semantic analysis, and topic modeling – to identify a) the extent to which the core of the discipline of economics has dealt with the question of climate change and b) how engagement with climate change has been framed, especially with respect to varying forms of inequality – intergenerational, domestic, and global. As a proxy for the core of mainstream economic thought, we work with publications from the top five economic journals – American Economic Review (AER), Econometrica (ECMA), The Journal of Political Economy (JPE), The Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), and The Review of Economic Studies (ReStud) – from 1975 to 2023. We find that over this period, these journals have cumulatively only published 25 unique research articles on the topic of climate change, and we also find that those publications reflected a lack of engagement with the role and consequences of domestic and global inequality in dynamics of climate change.