Here is a new JEP piece on the rise of research teams, with messages for economics. The short story is:

#1 Research teams have big benefits. Coauthored papers have increasing impact advantages, and solo-authored work is increasingly rare – in economics and other fields.

#2 But teamwork obscures credit, which is central to the reward system of science. Junior economists now produce little if any solo-authored work before tenure, leaving letter writers and promotion committees to decide tenure on increasingly opaque grounds.

#3 Deciding who deserves credit on a given team is really hard… and opens a wide door to bias, whether in tenure decisions as in Sarsons et al. (2021) (below), in grant money, or in prizes.

#4 What can do we do about it? Economics can look to the hard sciences for many lessons. See ideas here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.35.2.191