[snewe]

This could be very helpful, so long as academics maintain their profiles. I currently use an ad-hoc system of Google Reader's "check if webpage changed" functionality to check for new papers in my fields of interest. For economics, these are listed on pages like:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=M13

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=G24

which gives an ugly summary of updates to non-RSS friendly websites. Academia.edu appears to require that

1. Authors sign up

2. Authors also update their profiles with their new research

My experience suggests this will be difficult for econ: I repeated the Google readers process for the active authors in my field. Google tracks their "Working Papers" pages for updates and lets me know when they add a paper (or change a font!) For the two dozen authors I track, only one has updated their page in the last two months.

[jplewicke]

I'm not sure about field-wide RSS feeds, but SSRN does have author-specific RSS feeds like http://www.ssrn.com/rss/authors/1997/0701/998.rss for Eugene Fama.