Latex ignores natbib longnamesfirst option when using "econometrica" bibliography style

Question

I am confounded as to why in this document latex is ignoring the natbib longnamesfirst option. I have used it in other documents without any problem. Any ideas are appreciated.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage[longnamesfirst,authoryear]{natbib}



\begin{document}

I want to cite \citet{BGG:1999} with the full list of authors names and then I want this citation \citet{BGG:1999} to appear with only the first author's names followed by et al. (1999).

\bibliographystyle{econometrica}
\bibliography{test_bib}

\end{document}

Here is the example bib file:

%%test_bib
@InCollection{BGG:1999,
author={Bernanke, Ben S. and Gertler, Mark and Gilchrist, Simon},
editor={J. B. Taylor and M. Woodford},
title={The financial accelerator in a quantitative business cycle framework},
booktitle={Handbook of Macroeconomics},
publisher={Elsevier},
year=1999,
month={},
volume={1},
number={},
series={Handbook of Macroeconomics},
edition={},
chapter={21},
pages={1341-1393}
}

And here is the output I am getting:

Answer 1

The econometrica.bst in CTAN is in the “obsolete” tree. It doesn't cooperate with natbib to allow longnamesfirst to act.

The successor seems to be ecta and, indeed, the following input seems to produce the correct output (but with a small difference in the placement of the publisher).

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@InCollection{BGG:1999,
  author={Bernanke, Ben S. and Gertler, Mark and Gilchrist, Simon},
  editor={J. B. Taylor and M. Woodford},
  title={The financial accelerator in a quantitative business cycle framework},
  booktitle={Handbook of Macroeconomics},
  publisher={Elsevier},
  year=1999,
  month={},
  volume={1},
  number={},
  series={Handbook of Macroeconomics},
  edition={},
  chapter={21},
  pages={1341-1393},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[longnamesfirst,authoryear]{natbib}

\begin{document}

I want to cite \citet{BGG:1999} with the full list of authors names and then I want this citation
\citet{BGG:1999} to appear with only the first author's names followed by et al. (1999).

\bibliographystyle{ecta}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}

The filecontents* environment is just to make the environment selfcontained.

Answer 2

As I understand it, using the long or short version of the citation requires the cooperation of the bibliography style, econometrica in your case. It might be that it does not support abbreviated names, or that other measures are necessary. Anyway the behaviour you are after is style-dependent, as this and this post imply.