Trouble at the Fed: Investigation Into Lisa Cook’s Academic Record Raises Questions

Lisa D. Cook is one of the world’s most powerful economists. She taught economics at Harvard University and Michigan State University and served on the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers before being appointed, in 2022, to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which controls the interest rates and money supply of the United States.

Despite her pedigree, questions have long persisted about her academic record. Her publication history is remarkably thin for a tenured professor, and her published work largely focuses on race activism rather than on rigorous, quantitative economics. Her nomination to the Fed required Vice President Kamala Harris to cast a tie-breaking vote; by contrast, her predecessor in the seat, Janet Yellen, now Treasury secretary, was confirmed unanimously.

The quality of her scholarship has also received criticism. Her most heralded work, 2014’s “Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940,” examined the number of patents by black inventors in the past, concluding that the number plummeted in 1900 because of lynchings and discrimination. Other researchers soon discovered that the reason for the sudden drop in 1900 was that one of the databases Cook relied on stopped collecting data in that year. The true number of black patents, one subsequent study found, might be as much as 70 times greater than Cook’s figure, effectively debunking the study’s premise.

Cook also seems to have consistently inflated her own credentials. In 2022, investigative journalist Christopher Brunet pointed out that, despite billing herself as a macroeconomist, Cook had never published a peer-reviewed macroeconomics article and had misrepresented her publication history in her CV, claiming that she had published an article in the journal American Economic Review. In truth, the article was published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, a less prestigious, non-peer-reviewed magazine.

An exclusive City Journal and Daily Wire investigation reveals additional facts that cast new doubt on Cook’s seriousness as a scholar.

In a series of academic papers spanning more than a decade, Cook appears to have copied language from other scholars without proper quotation and duplicated her own work and that of coauthors in multiple academic journals without proper attribution. Both practices appear to violate Michigan State University’s own written academic standards.

We will review several examples which, taken together, establish a pattern of careless scholarship at best or, at worst, academic misconduct.

In a 2021 paper titled “The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names,” Cook copied-and-pasted verbatim language from Charles Calomiris and Jonathan Pritchett, without using quotation marks when describing their findings, as required. Here is the original passage from Calomiris and Pritchett:

During this time, New Orleans was the largest city in the South and the site of its largest slave market. Unlike states with a common law tradition, Louisiana treated slaves like real estate, and slave sales had to be recorded and notarized in order to establish title (Louisiana 1806, section 10). Today, the records of many of these slave sales may be found in the New Orleans Notarial Archives and the New Orleans Conveyance Office. Because of the availability of these records and the size of the market, New Orleans is the best source for data on slave sales within the United States.

Here is Cook’s paper, which, though it cites Calomiris and Pritchett, lifts their language verbatim, which we have marked in italics, substituting only the word “slaves” with the politically correct phrase “the enslaved”:

Unlike states with a common law tradition, Louisiana treated the enslaved like real estate, and slave sales had to be recorded and notarized in order to establish title (Louisiana 1806 section 10). Today the records of many of these slave sales may be found in the New Orleans Notarial Archives and the New Orleans Conveyance Office. Because of the availability of these records and the size of the market, New Orleans is the best source for data on slave sales within the United States. [ . . . ]

During this time New Orleans was the largest city in the South and the site of its largest slave market.

She does something similar in her October 2021 paper, “Closing the Innovation Gap In Pink and Black,” which, despite significant government subsidies and years spent on it by Cook, summarized the work of researchers Charles Becker, Cecilia Elena Rouse, and Mingyu Chen by copying roughly 70 words without quotes.

This appears to be a violation of the standards in Michigan State University’s guidebook, which states that authors must paraphrase or add direct quotations to verbatim passages. “It is your responsibility to make certain that you understand the difference between quoting and paraphrasing, as well as the proper way to cite and delineate quoted material,” the guidebook reads.

In multiple papers, Cook also appears to have copied language from her own prior papers, or those of coauthors, without proper attribution.

In a 2018 paper, “Rural Segregation and Racial Violence,” Cook appears as the lead author, with scholars Trevon Logan and John Parman as coauthors. But this paper simply duplicates word-for-word much of Logan and Parman’s prior work without Cook. {snip}

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Complicating things further, that 2018 paper by the same three authors also recycled, without proper attribution, long passages of identical language from an article they published in another journal, “Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching.” {snip}

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Finally, Cook recycled substantial portions of at least three passages from her own 2011 paper, “Inventing social capital: Evidence from African American inventors, 1843–1930,” in the 2014 paper on patents that helped propel her to academic stardom.

When reached for comment, a Federal Reserve spokesman pointed to Cook’s prior testimony to Congress, in which she stated: “I certainly am proud of my academic background.”

Does the deliberate recycling of old material, including material from coauthors, constitute academic misconduct? It is true that journalists, for example, often adapt previous reporting into a compilation or a book. But the standard in academia is more rigorous. According to the Michigan State University guidebook, republishing identical material across multiple journals, without proper attribution, appears to be a violation of the rule against “self-plagiarism.” The standard is that scholars cannot use copied language “regardless of whether [they] are or are not the author of the source of the copied text or idea.”

{snip} At Michigan State, administrators have warned students that “plagiarism is considered fraud and has potentially harsh consequences including loss of job, loss of reputation, and the assignation of reduced or failing grade in a course.” Certainly, for an esteemed professor and now a governor of the Federal Reserve, that standard should be the bare minimum.

Cook is no stranger to mobilizing such punishments against others. In 2020, she participated in the attempted defenestration of esteemed University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig for the crime of publicly opposing the “defund the police” movement. She called for Uhlig’s removal from the classroom, claiming that he had made an insensitive remark about Martin Luther King, Jr. (The university closed its own inquiry after concluding that there was “not a basis” to investigate further.) Uhlig, in a 2022 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, asked the pertinent question: Under the leadership of an ideologue such as Lisa Cook, would the Fed continue to pursue its mandate, or succumb to left-wing activism?

Time will tell if the gears of justice turn against Lisa Cook, or if repeated academic misconduct, defended by some as mere sloppiness or isolated mistakes, is fast becoming an acceptable part of the academic order—as long as the alleged author of that behavior is favored by the powerful.