An Influential Economics Forum Has a Troubling Surplus of Trolls

Maya Rossin-Slater first learned the internet was mad at her one day in May 2016, when she received a text message from a grad school friend. It included a link to a website called Economics Job Market Rumors, or EJMR, an anonymous forum notorious among economists for its freewheeling, combative and often bigoted discussion threads.

Rossin-Slater, then a third-year assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, had recently co-authored a paper about the effect of prenatal exposure to maternal stress on children’s health. The study, “Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation,” used Swedish administrative data to compare the health of people who had a relative die while they were still in the womb with those who had a relative die during the year after their birth. Their research found that members of the former cohort had an increased likelihood of suffering from ADHD, anxiety or depression later on. The paper was, the co-authors wrote, “the first to document a causal link between fetal stress exposure and mental health in later life.” It had been accepted for publication in 2015 by the American Economic Review (AER), one of the most prestigious journals in the field—a huge deal for anyone, let alone a young professor.