What do Editors Maximize? Evidence from Four Leading Economics Journals / David Card, Stefano DellaVigna.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Card, David.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

DellaVigna, Stefano.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23282.

NBER working paper series no. w23282

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

Summary:

We study editorial decision-making using anonymized submission data for four leading economics journals: the Journal of the European Economics Association, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. We match papers to the publication records of authors at the time of submission and to subsequent Google Scholar citations. To guide our analysis we develop a benchmark model in which editors maximize the expected quality of accepted papers and citations are unbiased measures of quality. We then generalize the model to allow different quality thresholds for different papers, and systematic gaps between citations and quality. Empirically, we find that referee recommendations are strong predictors of citations, and that editors follow the recommendations quite closely. Holding constant the referees' evaluations, however, papers by highly-published authors get more citations, suggesting that referees impose a higher bar for these authors, or that prolific authors are over-cited. Editors only partially offset the referees' opinions, effectively discounting the citations of more prolific authors in their revise and resubmit decisions by up to 80%. To disentangle the two explanations for this discounting, we conduct a survey of specialists, asking them for their preferred relative citation counts for matched pairs of papers. The responses show no indication that prolific authors are over-cited and thus suggest that referees and editors seek to support less prolific authors.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2017.