Citing non-economics studies in an economics research paper I am currently working on a paper in economics that has some dimensions that discuss women's social value. As is the case in developing countries a lot of economic studies do not exist whereas there are tons in Sociology. While I am not convinced by the sociology results, is it ok (from the perspective of a reviewer) to borrow from that to build a narrative.
For example, if I am looking at fertility levels in a country and there is a sociological study that speaks of the link of women's perceived value and her fertility which is rarely discussed in econ literature, could I potentially use this to discuss a point in my paper? Ergo, there is anthropological/sociological arguments that indicate that a woman's value in country x is linked to her fertility? Or is that too speculative from the standpoint of an economist?
As an economist myself, I am confused but then again I would use this to argue my point.
As long as the main results/conclusions of your paper don't rely solely on the non-economics literature you cite, you should be okay. In other words, it's perfectly fine to use non-economics literature to motivate or even as part of the support for your thesis, as long as you also include proper economic arguments, i.e. theoretical models or econometric analyses.
For example, Bidner and Eswaran (2015) theorized about the origin of the Indian caste system and cited quite a few sociological, anthropological, and biological literature to motivate their model.
Likewise, Caplan and Dean (2008), which provides axiomatic foundations for a neuroscientific hypothesis (that dopamine encodes the &quot;reward prediction error&quot;), is full of references to the psychology and neuroscience literature. The paper even includes an extended review of the non-economic literature and explains how they are relevant for economic decision-making.
Similar examples are plentiful, and they end up in high-rank journals because, notwithstanding their non-economics citations, those papers contain substantive economic contributions.