56 pages. back in the 80s and earlier, papers were much shorter. It's not like the claim being made here necessitates such a long paper compared to earlier studies.
https://jeffbloem.com/2018/07/27/are-economics-papers-too-lo...
I duno why the original comment was down-voted so much. shorter papers are quicker to read and faster to compose. If shorter papers were good enough 30 years go, why not now?
Society can only support so many high-status cathedral positions, but the competition has increased significantly.
Maybe the answer is some researchers just wrote a paper, non-typeset spacing is pretty wasteful, and Word does a bad job at tables, rather than some deep rooted societal crisis in "high-status cathedral positions".
(/s, obviously)