Editorial board interlocks in financial economics

We examine the patterns of editorial collaboration in 20 leading finance journals, from 1994 to 2013. We investigate the social structure of editorship across journals, editorial positions, nationalities and affiliations. Our sociological argument is structured upon Bourdieu's (1988) concept of social and symbolic capital and Whitley's (2000) concept of norm. Our analysis identifies elite scientists who influence the orientation as well as the content of published research in finance. We find that the academic community of editors is rather permeably structured; it is spread around a dense core and a relatively scattered periphery. Moreover, we find that editorial board membership has become increasingly accessible to scientists of diverse nationalities, while, within the network, the number of cohesive subgroups decreases across the sample period.