To bolster your comment, let me add that Economics as a field is particularly corrupt with regards to how much the reputation of your institution counts for job

To bolster your comment, let me add that Economics as a field is particularly corrupt with regards to how much the reputation of your institution counts for jobs/publications. For example, the leading journal of economics that is "Quarterly Journal of Economics" has 50% of it's articles only from Harvard and MIT. That means 2 schools out of the hundreds who do economics dominate the leading journal. Although Harvard+MIT are good, by no means are they THAT much better over Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton etc. It is obvious that the reviewers are accepting their own people (QJE is a Harvard journal) over other people. The comparable figure for Physics is something like the top 100-odd schools produce the half of the research. That seems like a much fairer distribution. Take the inherent fuzziness of social science research, compound it with prestige gaming, compound with the impossibility of reporting a negative result, and what you get is shoddy research.