The SOLE-JOLE 2026 conference is approaching, and as I do for most conferences I attend, I scraped the program to see who is presenting, where they’re from, and what they’re writing about.
The co-authorship network The motivation for the title of this post: nobody is sole at SOLE. Below is the co-authorship network, where each node is an author appearing on a SOLE-JOLE 2026 paper, and edges connect co-authors. Hover, drag, and search for authors to explore. When you press on a researcher, you’ll get their network stats (degree, closeness, etc) as well as information about where their papers are being presented.
If the network doesn’t load above, you can also open it in a new tab.
Who is presenting?
Some authors show up on multiple papers in the program. Here are the 20 most-frequent author names across the SOLE-JOLE 2026 program:
Where are they coming from?
Affiliations are dominated by the usual suspects in labor economics. The top 20 institutions represented in the program:
What are people writing about?
A first pass at the topics of the program, here are wordclouds for paper titles and abstracts.
Single words only get you so far. Bigrams (two-word phrases) and trigrams (three-word phrases) are more informative about the actual research questions being asked.
Going one level deeper, I fit a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model on the abstracts to group papers into latent topics. The top words for each topic give a sense of what clusters of research are being presented.
I hope to see you there and to grab a coffee!
Uploaded 2026-04-28