American Finance Association Still Mostly Studying Finance
Compared to the American Economics Association, its focal topics of study based on word counts still heavily emphasize traditional topics
Last week’s post presented evidence on the shift of the American Economics Association (AEA) meeting papers towards the study of gender, race, and inequality. That analysis focused exclusively on the AEA’s annual program at the annual Allied Social Science Association (ASSA) convention. There are a number of other organizations that participate in the ASSA meetings, which they are allowed to do at the recognition of the AEA. The largest of these other organizations is the American Finance Association (AFA), which runs a similarly robust program of academic papers.
Using the same techniques describe last week, we performed word count analysis on the AFA program. The findings?
Based on this word count analysis, the AFA program has been significantly more stable in its focal topics of study. In 2011, the top 5 AFA words were finance/financial, market, evidence, risk, and return. In 2024, they are finance/financial, market, evidence, corporate, and price/pricing. In recent years, we’ve clearly seen a resurgence of interest in banks, which occupied 4th place in 2018 and 8th place in 2024, up from 25th place in 2011. In 2024 we’ve also seen the words bond, rate, lending, money/monetary, and policy increasing in importance. Words like risk, asset, capital fund, investor, and so on have largely held steady.
The AFA is therefore still mostly studying traditional topics in finance - financial markets and financial institutions - although there have been shome shifts further down the list. There were 950 unique words in AFA paper and session titles in 2024. The word gender broke the top 100 for the first time in 2024. The number of appearances of the word gender in the 2024 meeting program analysis tied with around 20 other words including loan, housing, carbon, emmission, and race/racial. The word race/racial has seen roughly similar representation over the past three years 2022-2024, ranking in this 80-100 range. It appeared for the first time at all among the AFA paper and session titles in 2016, while the word gender made its debut in 2014.
For comparison, here is the key American Economics Association (AEA) graph again from last week.
