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EXCLUSIVE: Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook is one of the most powerful economists in the world. But @LukeRosiak and I have discovered that her academic work appears to contain plagiarism, according to her former university’s policy.

The plagiarism scandal hits the Fed. 🧵 

There have long been questions about Cook’s academic work. Her publication history is quite thin, contains serious methodological errors, and largely focuses on race activism rather than rigorous, quantitative econ. She had trouble getting approved by the Senate.

We have found that, 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. 

In "The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names," Cook copied-and-pasted verbatim language from Calomiris and Pritchett, without using quotation marks when describing their findings, as required by her own university’s written policy.

In "Rural Segregation and Racial Violence," Cook appears as the lead author, with Logan and Parman as coauthors. But this paper simply duplicates much of Logan and Parman's prior work, which appears to be a violation of MSU's policy on "self plagiarism."

In the same paper, Cook and the same coauthors recycle, without proper attribution, long passages of identical language from an article they published in another journal, "Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching."

Cook's work is littered with these and other instances of plagiarism and self-plagiarism, according to MSU's policy. Some of the instances are minor, perhaps signifying sloppiness, but others are much more troubling, rising to apparent misconduct.

Read the full story at City Journal: