journal pricing and mergers a portfolio approach despite their influence on the careers of economists the production and pricing of scholarly journals have received scant attention from the profession by contrast the issue of journal quality and scholarly research productivity have been studied in far greater detail a search in the econlit database using the term journal generates several dozen papers on this topic although there may be a number of reasons for this imbalance it is likely that the tenure process combined with the low if not zero effective cost of journals on campuses have influenced our research agenda in other words while professors worry about their job security publish well or perish others their librarians are charged with maintaining free access to all relevant journals of course this pattern is observed not just in economics but across academic disciplines in recent years however easy access to journals has been threatened beset by persistent journal price inflation especially in the socalled stm fields or science technology and medicine and stagnant budgets many university libraries have been forced to reallocate dollars from monographs to journals to postpone the purchase of new journal titles and in some cases to cancel titles as a consequence libraries often relied on interlibrary loans to satisfy faculty demands this situation and its possible causes has been studied at great length in the library science literature with few exceptions a consensus has evolved there which focuses on the growing importance of commercial publishers in the market for scholarly journals over the past decade or more commercial firms have aggressively raised prices at a rate disproportionate to any increase in costs or quality this appears to be especially true for the largest commercial firms although the analysis underlying these conclusions is generally not of the multivariate sort it is suggestive enough to warrant further investigation school of economics georgia institute of technology 781 marietta street nw atlanta ga 30318 e mail mark mccabe econ gatech edu i would like to thank many of my former colleagues at the department of justice including craig conrath renata hesse aaron hoag russ pittman david reitman dan rubinfeld and greg werden as well as jonathan baker cory capps george deltas luke froeb jeffrey mackie mason roger noll dan o brien richard quandt lars hendrik roller steve salop and margaret slade seminar participants at the federal trade commission georgia tech north carolina state university suny stony brook and wissenschaft zentrum berlin and participants at the meetings of the american economic association the european association of research in industrial economics the southern economics association and western economics association the association of research libraries and its members the national library of medicine the georgia tech library and the georgia tech foundation have provided invaluable assistance expert data support was provided by a large group of individuals including deena bernstein claude briggs pat finn doug heslep and steve stiglitz finally i would like to thank the dozens of librarians and publishers who have provided me with important insights 1 the exceptions are janusz a ordover and robert d willig 1978 lisa lieberman et al 1992 george a chressanthis and june d chressanthis 1994 mccabe 2000 and theodore c bergstrom 2001 ordover and willig model the pricing of a single title to institutional and individual subscribers bergstrom s paper discusses the differences between commercial and nonprofit economics journals the other three papers are discussed below 2 increasingly journals are available in both print and digital versions and for some new titles only a digital format is available see carol tenopir and donald king 2000 ch 15 starting in 1998 commercial publishers began placing their content online although major research libraries have generally responded by adding digital access this shift is still in its early stages especially in cases where library collections are more specialized e g the typical biomedical library for this reason as well as the fact that more than two thirds of the sample period occurred in a print only environment the emphasis of this paper is on the behavior of publishers and libraries in a print environment the economic implications of digital access are considered briefly at the conclusion of the paper and are a subject of ongoing research 3 see martha kyrillidou 1999 4 see tenopir and king 2000 ch 13 for a review of this literature an alternative explanation for journal price inflation has been offered by lieberman et al 1992 they argue that entry by new titles over time has lowered circulation for existing journals forcing the latter to raise prices to cover fixed costs

a theory of self selection in a market with matching frictions an application to delay in refereeing times in economics journals abstract a matching market with imperfect information is studied with imperfect information it is shown that friction in a meeting process can facilitate self selection and thus may improve the matching outcome as an application the effect of delay in refereeing time on publication outcome is analyzed in a publication process in economics journals though the delay causes efficiency loss by postponing the dissemination of new research it will better sort the papers to each journal by their qualities by preventing mediocre papers from being submitted to a prestigious journal and published by luck if an assortative outcome good papers in prestigious journals and mediocre papers in less prestigious journals is efficient the delay may actually improve the publication outcome other matching market examples are also discussed

interaction between the formal and informal financial sectors the asian experience abstract the nature of the interaction between the formal and informal financial sectors in developing countries is a subject with important policy implications it has implications for the future of informal finance as the formal sector expands in the long term will the informal sector wither away as the traditional view of financial dualism assumes or will it continue to play an important complementary role perhaps even growing in absolute size second the pattern of two major policy approaches often advocated toward the informal sector offering it stronger competition so as to induce it to improve its terms and promoting linkages with it so as to take advantage of its lower transactions costs in reaching smaller and poorer borrowers third the existence of a large informal sector has implications for the efficacy of monetary and credit policy in achieving stabilization objectives fourth the interaction between the formal and informal financial sectors also has implications for the effects of financial liberalization through removing restrictions on the deposit rate of interest this paper draws on the experience of asian countries to address these issues

financial inclusion and financial integrity aligned incentives summary the financial action task force embraces financial inclusion as complementary to anti money laundering and counter terrorist financing as it enhances transparency this support is based on the premise that the increased use of formal financial services leads to a reduction of usage of informal services we present evidence on eight african countries that both are not negatively associated moreover informal employment and cash preference reduce the inclination to use mobile financial services if an increase in transparency acts as disincentive to use formal services the alignment of financial inclusion and integrity will fail

open access and academic journal quality ing from complicated signaling behavior by informed authors lerner and tirole show that adding upstream private information does not alter their basic analysis their proposition 4 454 aea papers and proceedings may 2005

the underground economies tax evasion and information distortion list of contributors preface introduction edgar l feige part i the meaning measurement and policy implications of the underground economies 1 the meaning and measurement of the underground economy edgar l feige 2 information distortions in social systems the underground economy and other observer subject policymaker feedbacks robert r alford and edgar l feige 3 policy illusion macroeconomic instability and the unrecorded economy robert t mcgee and edgar l feige 4 how large or small should the underground economy be bruno frey part ii the underground economy in western developed nations measurement in different laboratories 5 monetary perspective on underground economic activity in the united states richard d porter and amanda s bayer 6 the unrecorded economy and the national income accounts in the netherlands a sensitivity analysis g a a m broesterhuizen 7 assessing the underground economy in the united kingdom michael o higgins 8 the underground economy in the federal republic of germany a preliminary assessment enno langfeldt 9 the underground economy in sweden ingemar hansson 10 the irregular economy of italy a survey of contributions bruno contini 11 the hidden economy in norway with special emphasis on the hidden labor market arne jon isachsen and steiner strom 12 canada s underground economy rolf mirus and roger s smith 13 the underground economy in france philippe barthelemy part iii the underground economy under central planning 14 the soviet second economy in a political and legal perspective f j m feldbrugge 15 second economy and socialism the hungarian experience istvan r gabor bibliography

speculative attacks on the currency with uncertain monetary policy reactions abstract we show that balance of payments crises are accompanied by discrete shifts in the exchange rate if in the pre crisis situation the exchange rate is constrained by set limits and there is uncertainty about monetary policy reactions

balance of payments crises in a cash in advance economy the author shows that a flexible prices sidrauski type model with a cash in advance constraint is capable of depicting some of the phenomena associated with a balance of payments crisis like the onesrecently observed in argentina and mexico current accounts deficits and appreciation of the real exchange rat e it is also shown that these phenomena become exacerbated as the rate of devaluation before the crisis occurs becomes smaller copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

is peer review in decline i introduction for the past half century or more peer reviewed journals have played a central role in the evaluation and dissemination of scientific research the internet has enhanced scientific communication in many ways and there is considerable excitement around new institutions for disseminating research 1 a more sobering thought however is that new technologies can also be disruptive this paper begins with some documentation of recent trends in economics publishing roughly the trends involve economists from top ranked departments publishing fewer papers in many top journals this could be a welcome change but is also potentially troublesome one way in which the internet could be disruptive is that it could allow high profile researchers to disseminate their work without subjecting it to peer review which in turn could lead to a broader unraveling of the peer review system the majority of the paper is then devoted to analyses of several additional data sources with the goal of understanding better what may be causing the observed trends the facts part of this paper documents two main facts 1 economists in top ranked departments now publish very few papers in top field journals there is a marked decline in such publications between the early 1990s and early 2000s 2 comparing the early 2000s with the early 1990s there is a decline in both the absolute number of papers and the share of papers in the top general interest journals written by harvard economics department faculty although the second fact just concerns one department i see it as potentially important to understanding what is happening because it comes at a time when harvard is widely regarded i believe correctly as having ascended to the top position in the profession the decline of peer review theory i allude to in the title is that the necessity of going through the peer review process has lessened for high status authors in the old days peer reviewed journals were by far the most effective means of reaching readers whereas with the growth of the internet high status authors can now post papers online and exploit their reputation to attract readers many alternate explanations are possible i focus on four theories the decline in peer review theory and three alternatives 1 the trends could be a consequence of top school authors being crowded out of the top journals by other researchers several such stories have an optimistic message for example there is more talent entering the profession old pro elite biases are being broken down more schools are encouraging faculty to do cutting edge research and the internet is enabling more cutting edge research by breaking down informational barriers that had hampered researchers outside the top schools 2 2 the trends could be a consequence of the growth of revisions at economics journals discussed in ellison 2002a 2002b in this more pessimistic theory highly productive researchers must abandon some projects and or seek out faster outlets to conserve the time now required to publish their most important works 3 the trends could simply reflect that field journals have declined in quality in some relative sense and become a less attractive place to publish this theory is meant to encompass also the rise of new journals which is not obviously desirable or undesirable the majority of this paper is devoted to examining various data sources that provide additional details about how economics publishing has changed over the past decade these are intended both to sharpen understanding of the facts to be explained and to provide tests of auxiliary predictions of the theories two main sources of information are used data on publications and data on citations the publication data include department level counts of publications in various additional journals an individual level dataset containing records of publications in a subset of journals for thousands of economists and a very small dataset containing complete data on a few authors publication records

the market of academic journals evidence from data on french libraries this paper analyzes the demand and cost structure of the french market of academic journals after merging several databases we estimate an aggregated nested logit demand system combined simultaneously with a pricing equation taking into account the evolution of impact factors of journals we identify the structural parameters of this market and find that price elasticities of demand are relatively high indicating that this industry experiences competitive constraints we conjecture that the two sidedness feature of academic journals could be a rationale for our results jel l11 l13 l82 c35

fear of rejection tiered certification and transparency product quality certifiers may not reveal the identity of unsuccessful applicants sellers for three reasons first they respond to the desire of individual sellers to avoid the stigma from rejection second nontransparency helps a certifier to increase his market power by raising the stigma from lower tier certification third transparency does not help screen among heterogeneous sellers strategic complementarities arise as sellers move down the certification pecking order and lead to the stigmatization of the lower tiers mandating transparency benefits the sellers but has an ambiguous impact on buyers who actually become less informed about product quality

identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals an open access journal allows free online access to its articles obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support using panel data on science journals we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations in contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies we find a more modest effect moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8 on average in our sample the benefit is concentrated among top ranked journals in fact open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom ranked journals in our sample leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers attention generating losers as well as winners jel l17 o33

shadow economies size causes and consequences using various methods the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing transition and oecd countries is estimated average size varies from 12 percent of gdp for oecd countries to 23 percent for transition countries and 39 percent for developing countries increasing taxation and social security contributions combined with rising state regulations are driving forces for the increase of the shadow economy especially in oecd countries according to some findings corruption has a positive impact on the size of the shadow economy and a growing shadow economy has a negative effect on official gdp growth

credit reporting financial intermediation and identification systems international evidence abstract credit reporting systems are an important ingredient for financial markets these systems are based upon the unique identification of borrowers which is enabled if a compulsory national identification system exists in a country we present evidence derived from difference in difference analyses on the impact of credit reporting and identification systems on financial intermediation in 172 countries between 2000 and 2008 our results suggest that the introduction of a mandatory identification system has a positive effect on financial intermediation bank credit to deposits net interest margins and financial access private credit to gdp especially in countries where there is also a credit reporting system

submission fees and response times in academic publishing both submission fees and response times enable editors to maintain an acceptable refereeing burden by discouraging the submission of articles with low probability of acceptance when authors differ in their ability or willingness to pay submission fees and deal with delays journal quality is maximized under a combination of moderate fees and moderate delays

collection sales good or bad for journals this paper discusses the impact of collection sales i e the bundling of several journals for sale by publishers to libraries on journals the advent of electronic journal distribution implies that bundling is an efficient sales strategy and can act to extend the reach of a journal current arrangements are discussed and shown to lead to tensions between commercial publishers and non profit journals the paper argues that non profit journals should not necessarily abandon collection sales programmes rather non profit journals may benefit from withdrawing from commercial publishers which distribute their own for profit journals and joining together to be distributed by less commercial publishers who set relatively low prices for their collections

free labor for costly journals there is a remarkable difference between the prices that commercial publishers charge to libraries for economics journals and the prices charged by professional societies and university presses this price difference does not reflect a difference in quality the six most cited economics journals listed in the social science citation index are all nonprofit journals and their library subscription prices average about 180 per year only five of the 20 most cited journals are owned by commercial publishers and the average price of these five journals is about 1660 per year tables 1 and 2 compare library costs and measures of cost effectiveness for the ten most cited nonprofit journals and the ten most cited journals owned by commercial presses the average price per page of the commercial journals is about six times as high and the average price per citation is about 16 times as high as for the nonprofit journals in tables 1 and 2 the first column shows the year 2001 library subscription price and the second column shows the price per page calculated by dividing year 2001 price by the number of pages published in the year 2000 the third column reports the price per citation this is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that articles in this journal were cited in 1998 as recorded by the social science citation index the fourth column price per recent citation is the library subscription price divided by the number of times that the 1996 and 1997 volumes of the journal were cited in 1998 the citation rank is found by ranking journals according to the number of times that this journal was cited in 1998 the differences in prices and cost effectiveness between nonprofit and commercial journals are similar for less prestigious journals i have assembled a data

does online availability increase citations theory and evidence from a panel of economics and business journals abstract does online availability boost citations using a panel of citations to economics and business journals we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality disappearing once fixed effects are added as controls the absence of aggregate effects masks heterogeneity across platforms jstor has a uniquely large effect boosting citations around 10 we examine other sources of heterogeneity including whether jstor disproportionately increases cites from developing countries or to long tail articles our theoretical analysis informs the econometric specification and allows citation increases to be translated into welfare terms

mobile money financial inclusion and development a review with reference to african experience we survey literature on mobile money and its contribution in promoting financial inclusion and development with a focus on sub saharan africa we use taxonomic descriptive and analytical methods to evaluate the state of knowledge in the area we analyse how mobile technology in general may contribute to economic development and financial inclusion in theory and practise we explain the mechanics of mobile money using kenya s m pesa as a canonical example and consider whether the literature has fully established the potential economic impact of mobile money especially its contribution to financial inclusion we also consider market structure pricing and regulatory implications of mobile money we conclude by highlighting issues that require further investigation the take up of mobile money mobile money and financial inclusion substitutability between mobile money and conventional finance and regulatory structures for institutions providing mobile money services

what do we know about the shadow economy estimates of the size of the shadow economy in 21 oecd countries are presented the average size of the shadow economy as a percentage of official gdp over 1999 2000 in these countries is 16 7 the author concludes that it is the increasing burden of taxation and social security contributions combined with rising state regulatory activities that are the driving forces for the recent growth in size of the shadow economy in the countries concerned

submission demand in core economics journals a panel study i introduction academic economics journals have proliferated to around 1 500 providing economists a large number of outlets for publishing manuscripts econlit n d ideas n d although researchers have examined how the demand for submission for academic economics journals responded to nonprice variables such as an editorial policy change on page limit card and dellavigna 2012 surprisingly the price elasticity of demand for submission remains unknown and becomes the focus of this study the objective of this study was to examine empirically what factors influence authors decisions on which economics journal to submit to focusing on three sets of demand factors manuscript submission fee observed journal quality such as impact factor and ranking and journal usage such as abstract views and library subscriptions similar to most of the literature on economics journals we focused on the economics journals indexed in journal citation reports jcr compiled by the institute for scientific information because jcr journals tend to be viewed as the core or leading academic journals two challenges arose in estimating the demand for journal submission first submission fee may be endogenous if supply and demand are simultaneously determined or if economics journals set the fee based on demand variations that the econometrician does not observe and hence cannot explicitly specify in the demand model to reduce the potential endogeneity bias we surveyed journal editors to obtain and use as an instrument the fee paid to a journal referee for reviewing the reviewer fee might serve as a good instrument in this case because the reviewer fee which is a supply side variable generally is paid by the submission fee there is little evidence to support that paying referees is correlated with unobserved journal quality such as journal reputation indeed a recent study by chetty saez and sandor 2014 found that reviewer fees have little or no effects on quality of the reviewer reports based on an experiment with referees at the journal of public economics casting doubt on the relationship between reviewer fee and referee report the second challenge is that journal quality such as journal reputation or editor reputation is not observed by the econometrician our strategy to address this issue was to use panel data to control for unobserved individual journal effect by supplementing the jcr citation data with other publicly available data and our two rounds of surveys of journal editors we constructed a unique panel dataset that contains various journal characteristics such as submission fee fee paid to a journal referee for reviewing and the number of new submissions for the years of 2008 and 2013 thompson scientific institute for scientific information 2008 and 2013 many researchers have analyzed theoretically the role of submission fee and or response times in academic publishing e g azar 2006 cotton 2013 heintzelman and nocetti 2009 leslie 2005 for a recent example cotton 2013 showed that journal quality could be maximized through a combination of both moderate fees and moderate delays when authors have heterogeneous preferences such a result is obviously based on the assumption that authors respond negatively to a submission fee from an empirical perspective submission fees raise the cost of submitting an article and therefore discourage the submission of papers especially those of marginal quality i e a self selection process regarding the quality of authors own manuscripts however several factors can alleviate the negative impact of submission fees on submissions first azar 2005 pointed out that the rewards for publications in good economics journals are very high compared with the relatively low submission fees second submission fees are sometimes paid by department funds and faculty s grants research contracts

balance of payments crises and monetary policy reactions in a model with imperfect substitutability between domestic and foreign bonds abstract we show that if domestic and foreign bonds are imperfect substitutes for each other and the exchange rate is fixed then unlike under the perfect substitutability assumption uncertainty about monetary policy reactions affects the timing of balance of payments crises

the collapse of the fixed exchange rate regime with sticky wages and imperfect substitutability between domestic and foreign bonds abstract the paper extends the recent literature on balance of payments crises by allowing real effects to be connected with them the collapse of the fixed exchange rate regime and the dynamics associated with this regime shift are studied in addition the effects of a fiscal expansion under the fixed exchange rate regime are studied taking into account the fact that the viability of the regime is policy dependent

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

the exact timing of the collapse of an exchange rate regime and its impact on the relative price of traded goods as of february 28 1983 ninety four countries are classified as having a fixed exchange rate regime 38 are pegged to the u s dollar 13 to the french franc 14 to the special drawing right and 24 to different baskets of currencies the choice of a fixed exchange rate peg implies a specific monetary discipline namely monetary growth equal to the growth rate of the currency or currencies to which a country is pegged monetary policy is thus subject to an exchange rate rule rather than to either a monetary growth rule or alternatively to discretionary policy a fixed exchange rate is a specific case of an active crawling peg where the preannounced rate of change in the exchange rate is zero active crawling peg rules whereby the exchange rate is adjusted downward by a preannounced amount over a specified period of time have been practiced in various places particularly in latin america recent experiments include argentina beginning december 1978 brazil during the 1980 calendar year chile from february 1978 to june 1979 jamaica from may 1978 to may 1979 portugal from august 1977 to june 1979 and uruguay beginning october 1978 1 at times the prean

the impact of formal financial inclusion on informal financial intermediation and cash preference evidence from africa this paper examines the effect of formal financial intermediation inclusion on informal financial intermediation and the use of cash for economic activities using data from the global findex 201