Mike Jensen Explains SSRN
Mike Jensen, the distinguished financial economist and co-founder of SSRN, is interviewed here by Growthology’s Tim Kane. Everyone knows that electronic distribution of working papers has been extremely important for academic research in business and the social sciences. By the time most papers are published, they’ve already been read by many, if not most, of the target readers, from working-paper circulation, conference presentations, informal discussions, and the like. Jensen points out that electronic distribution has also had an important democratization effect. The elites always had access to cutting-edge research in advance of publication through informal networks, NBER workshops, and the like. “In my own field, I was part of a very small group doing cutting-edge work in the early days of modern finance, and I noticed that elites in all fields were 2-3 years ahead of other scholars just because they knew about research that took so much time to get distributed widely. The Internet allowed everyone to see the frontier.”