Leadership in scholarship: Editors' appointments and scientific narrative

Academic journals disseminate new knowledge and therefore can influence the direction and composition of ongoing research by choosing what to publish. We study the change in the topic structure of papers published in the American Economic Review (AER) after the appointments of editors and coeditors of the AER between 1985 and 2011 using a textual analysis of accepted publications. The change due to the appointment of new AER editors, we find, is not an indicator of editors' personal taste in topics, but rather indicates the desire of those who appoint editors to premediate trends in other Top 5 journals.