Thomas Delcey, Aurélien Goutsmedt

The goal is to create a database of the Ph.D. defended in economics in the XXth and XXIst centuries in different countries. This project has a companion website, available here.

This project implies:

• to collect different information through different sources (from list of PhD in .pdf files to online institutional databases);
• to clean these different types of information to obtain the relevant information we need: the author of the PhD dissertation, its title, its date of defence, the university, and any other useful information (PhD supervisor, classification of the PhD dissertation, like a JEL code).

At this point, the project focuses on three countries:

• France, collecting data from the Sudoc and Theses.fr databases;
• The United States, collecting data from the list of PhD granted in US universities, published each year by the American Economic Review and then the Journal of Economic Literature;
• The United Kingdom, collecting data from the EThOS catalogue.

The repository is organised along the different databases for each country. For each country, two folders are available:

• The “documentation” (e.g., for France) folders contain the documentation about the building of the different database. You will find detailed explanations about the process of collecting the data and cleaning it for each country.
• The “R” (e.g., for France) folders contain the different scripts used to clean and produce the database for the the country in question.

You can find each database in a Zenodo repository:

• France

• United States: work in progress