estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

current publication lags in economics journals phe economics profession depends to a large degree upon its scholarly journals to disseminate the results and applications of its recently completed research the journal of economic literature is in fact evidence of that dependence much of the contents of each issue is devoted to an indexing of the current articles to facilitate both access to primary sources and quick cross referencing with related material but how recent are the results reported in the current literature how long does it usually take for a piece of research to evolve from a submitted manuscript to a published article to my knowledge only one study has confronted this question directly and it was published nearly 15 years ago in that study robert coe and irwin weinstock 1967 p 40 reported an average lag between submission and publication of 250 days 8 2 months for articles published in 1966 what has happened since there are no formal surveys to support the suspicion but there is evidence to suggest that the lags have actually increased some journals have begun to charge submission fees ostensibly to reduce the number of manuscripts they must review a plethora of specialized journals have emerged to provide new outlets for specialized papers and to relieve some of the burden from the traditional journals of more general scope one new journal economics letters has been founded completely in response to the lag problem it publishes short papers as quickly as possible in an effort to distribute at least the thrust of current research without a prolonged waiting period all of these responses to long lags lead to one question how severe are the current lags between submission and publication this brief note will report on the results of a survey that can begin to assess the current magnitude of the lag problem the major components of that problem and the success of the various efforts to alleviate it information about the lags involved in the 40 most recently published articles in each journal was solicited from the editors of 66 journals whose contents are routinely recorded in the jel twenty editors responded directly to the request and their reports formed the foundation of this study seven other journals were also in

profits layoffs and priorities this study examines the deliberations of professional mba students when presented with a dilemma that weighs the difference between commitments to profit maximization against concerns for fired workers who would need to seek a new job during a recession using content analysis accounting economic and ethically based rationales that differ from the profit maximizing recommendation are categorized results also show that those who make non profit maximizing recommendations consider but ultimately reject the profit maximizing approach to layoffs

is agency theory self activating this article examines the conditions under which the principal agent model is self activating socially causal we do so by exploring a principal agent framework that allows for the possibility that rational agents may hold intrinsic preferences for autonomy in decision making and experience disutility from being monitored using a dynamic model of preference formation we identify conditions under which the principal agent model is self activating in that over time the introduction of the model in an otherwise efficient monitor worker relationship leads to the inefficient adoption of the agency model we also examine the extent to which the agency model is robust when autonomy preferring agents are introduced into the population jel g30 l20 c72 i introduction as a social science economics seeks to both explain and influence behavior this in turn fosters a constructive process of self assessment of the economic approach to decision making for example in examining the effect of exposure to economics and differences in cooperativeness in the prisoner s dilemma frank gilovich and regan 1993 report that economics students were statistically more likely to frame the objective of the game in self interested terms and to refer exclusively to the features of the game itself in explaining their strategy choices rather than considering issues such as fairness trust or social norms frey and meier 2003 offer a more distilled view they use a nonlaboratory experiment voluntary student contributions to two university funds with an eye toward examining whether self interested students self select into economics selection bias or self interested behavior is a consequence of indoctrination surprisingly their most significant variable was the study of business economics which obviated both the self selection and indoctrination effects by contrast those with primary training in political economy exhibited neither effect in examining a dilemma in which subjects were forced to weigh their commitment to profit maximization against concern for workers who would be fired as a consequence of profit maximization during a time of high unemployment rubinstein 2006 found that economics students were statistically more likely to adhere to the profit maximization criterion similarly israeli readers of a business daily who had a ba in economics or an mba laid off more workers in the same survey one area where economic theory has played a significant role in both framing the issues and training the affected parties is executive compensation particularly the principal agent model beginning with berle and means 1932 agency theorists have recognized the need to overcome problems stemming from the separation of ownership and control in public corporations for example jensen and meckling 1976 further not only are the lessons from the principal agent model widely taught but its operationalization is also recognized within the popular press as the intellectual foundation for the shareholder value movement within corporate america as well as the doubling of the number of chief executives who were offered stock option plans from 1980 to 1994 1 whether seen as the embodiment of best practice or as the impetus for corporate avarice it cannot be denied that the operationalization of agency theory has revolutionized the culture of corporate america further bebchuck and fried s 2004 finding that the design of compensation schemes creates its own agency problems reinforces the core assumption of opportunistic behavior in agency theory the principal agent model is an example of a widely disseminated theory in which those who are exposed to it are expected both to put it into practice and have it practiced on them consequently the model raises expectations about the usefulness and occurrence of incentive based compensation schemes through its underlying assumptions about agents opportunism

aging and productivity among economists economists productivity over their careers and as measured by publication in leading journals declines very sharply with age there is no difference by age in the probability that an article submitted to a leading journal will be accepted rates of declining productivity are no greater among the very top publishers than among others and the probability of acceptance is increasingly related to the author s quality rather than the author s age

cash debt buy backs and the insurance value of reserves abstract the absence of terms of trade contingent instruments in international capital markets combined with differences in risk aversion between commercial creditors and ldc borrowers has important consequences for the welfare effects of cash debt buy backs in such circumstances secondary market prices fail to reflect the insurance value reserves have to debtors but not to creditors therefore the country buying back debt with reserves ends up unambiguously worse off even if it succeeds in capturing the full secondary market discount prevailing before the buy back

adoption of an imf programme and debt rescheduling an empirical analysis the existence of an empirical relationship between the adoption of an imf programme and the concession of a debt rescheduling by commercial and official creditors is tested using a bivariate probit model if countries who have arrangements with the imf are more likely than others to obtain a rescheduling of their external debt we could conclude that the adoption of an imf programme could work as a sort of signal of a country s good willingness which is thus rewarded with the debt relief the results confirm the existence of a significant effect of the adoption of an imf programme on the subsequent concession of a debt rescheduling by creditors

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

meta analysis in model implementation choice sets and the valuation of air quality improvements this research illustrates how the methods developed for meta analysis can serve to document and summarize voluminous information derived from repeated sensitivity analyses our application is to the sensitivity of welfare estimates derived from discrete choice models to assumptions about the choice set these assumptions affect welfare estimates through both the estimated parameters of the model and conditional on the parameters the substitution among alternatives in our specific application the evaluation is in terms of estimated benefits of air quality improvements in los angeles based on discrete choices of neighborhood and housing copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

the determinants of an environmentally responsive firm an empirical approach abstract our empirical results indicate that a firm s formulation of an environmental plan is positively influenced by customer pressure shareholder pressure government regulatory pressure and neighborhood and community group pressure but negatively influenced by other lobby group pressure sources and a firm s sales to asset ratio firms which view environmental issues as important in the next 5 years are also more likely to have a plan relative to the manufacturing sector firms in the natural resource sector are more likely to formulate environmental plans while firms in the service sector are less likely to have plans our results provide insight into how firms react to environmental issues they also offer policymakers a list of determinants which can be used either as an alternative or complement to environmental regulation

organizing debt relief the need for a new institution the banks they extended large short term credits to mexico then put pressure on the banks to reschedule mexican debt and lend more to mexico once the international monetary fund had endorsed the policies that mexico would follow to deal with its problems this was the birth of the case by case approach to the debt problem it was predicated implicitly on the belief that debtors faced a short term problem arising from an unusual combination of worldwide recession and high interest rates brought on by a shift in the policy stance of the major industrial countries on this view it was eminently sensible for debtors to take on more debt temporarily in order to pay interest on their existing debts the problem was still with us three years later however and the case by case approach was in trouble the world economy was growing again and interest rates had fallen but the debtor s export earnings were not growing and their governments were increasingly reluctant to deal with the imf which was asking for more austerity but providing less fund credit the banks were willing to reschedule larger amounts of debt for longer intervals but would put up new money only for the largest debtors

does multilateral lending aid capital accumulation role of intellectual capital and institutional quality abstract this paper investigates whether multilateral lending is more effective in accumulating capital in countries with a higher level of innovation specifically we examine the role of the world bank or imf financing on the capital stock using data from 175 countries over the period 1970 2017 while considering different types of long term external flows namely fdi and debt we find that fdi as a long term inflow influences domestic capital stock positively but non g7 countries even with a higher level of innovation are unable to benefit from greater fdi flows in boosting their capital stock which we explain considering institutional quality differences across countries with regard to foreign debt flows the multilateral lending only benefits the borrowing country if it has a greater level of intellectual capital or if those funds are used in financing innovative activities as opposed to short term imf loans world bank lending tends to be directed more towards long term development goals thereby helping boost productive capital exploiting a policy intervention with trips agreement the paper uncovers that countries with better institutional quality and greater innovation generate a higher level of capital stock

a signaling model of foreign direct investment attraction abstract foreign direct investors face uncertainty about government s type of the host country in a two period game we allow the host country s government to mitigate such uncertainty by sending a signal through fiscal policy our main finding states that a populist government may mimic a conservative one in order to attract foreign direct investment fdi and this choice depends mainly on its impatience degree and the originally planned fdi stock we highlight the role of the government s reputation in attracting foreign capital and thus provide some policy implications moreover our model explains why some governments considered to be populist adopt conservative policies in the beginning of its terms of office

does paying referees expedite reviews results of a natural experiment a natural experiment in an economics field journal afforded time series observations on payments to referees for on time reviews the natural experiment yielded 15 months worth of data with no payments and about two subsequent years of data with payments using refereeand manuscript specific measures as covariates hazard models were used to gauge the effects of payments on individual referee s review times all models indicate statistically significant reductions in review times owing to referee payments reductions in review times translate into significant reductions in first response time frt median frt was reduced from 90 to 70 days a 22 reduction in the presence of payments with payments only 1 of the frts exceeded six months without payments 16 of the frts exceeded six months

does incentive provision increase the quality of peer review an experimental study although peer review is crucial for innovation and experimental discoveries in science it is poorly understood in scientific terms discovering its true dynamics and exploring adjustments which improve the commitment of everyone involved could benefit scientific development for all disciplines and consequently increase innovation in the economy and the society we have reported the results of an innovative experiment developed to model peer review we demonstrate that offering material rewards to referees tends to decrease the quality and efficiency of the reviewing process our findings help to discuss the viability of different options of incentive provision supporting the idea that journal editors and responsible of research funding agencies should be extremely careful in offering material incentives on reviewing since these might undermine moral motives which guide referees behavior

debt buybacks signal sovereign countries creditworthiness theory and tests the authors show that debt buybacks could convey valuable information about indebted countries willingness to invest and increase debt repayment when creditors are less informed than debtors in an informational equilibrium unwilling countries do not repurchase a part of their debt but willing countries do and creditors increase debt repayments by offering reliefs only to those countries that repurchase data show that creditors systematically grant debt reliefs only to countries with buyback programs and a country s secondary market debt price is higher when it has a buyback program than if it does not copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

industry self regulation without sanctions the chemical industry s responsible care program industry self regulation the voluntary association of firms to control their collective action has been proposed as a complement to government regulation proponents argue that the establishment of

the impact of imf programs on asset values abstract this paper provides evidence on the effectiveness of the imf by examining the impact of its program on wealth we analyze all imf press releases about forthcoming aid for 16 emerging countries during the period 1989 1999 together with references in the financial times to possible imf support using event study methodology we measure the impact of these announcements on the prices of a number of assets including equities currencies domestic and foreign bank stocks and sovereign debt our findings suggest that neither the imf announcements nor the ft news have a measurable effect on asset values the exceptions are the announcements in the ft that suggest imf support is less likely to be forthcoming in these cases we observe negative abnormal returns

evaluating debt repurchases what are the alternatives to investment abstract a general model of debt repurchases is built which reconciles most points raised in the literature on buybacks the inclusion of assets alternative to domestic investment is shown to be of crucial importance in the analysis and leads to the reversal of some previous results it is shown that investment necessarily rises following a buyback independently of the source of the funds used the condition that determines whether or not buybacks are an attractive solution to the debtor is derived it is shown to depend on the price at which debt can be bought and on an interest differential effect

drift control of international reserves abstract we develop a model of optimal reserve holdings where the reserve authority controls the upward and downward drift of international reserves and chooses the trigger points that induce changes in drift we argue that this drift control model better describes the dynamic behavior of reserves than does the popular buffer stock model we present an innovative mathematical tool for analyzing the drift control based on martingale stopping theory since the reserve authority has more instruments with drift control than with a buffer stock strategy it can manage reserves at significantly lower cost

sovereign debt structural adjustment and conditionality abstract the lack of a proper enforcement mechanism for sovereign debt generates a commitment failure as a result a sovereign may seek to improve its position in debt renegotiations and thus evade its debt obligations by reducing exports conditionality seeks to provide a solution to the incentive problem by addressing the commitment failure formalizing this argument we show that conditionality helps the repayment of sovereign debt in certain circumstances it can eliminate debt overhang especially when it is coupled with concessionary lending of sufficient magnitude it is however unable to restore first best when it is anticipated by lenders conditionality may get international financial institutions and sovereign debtors into a trap where the debt overhang persist debt rescheduling takes place periodically and conditionality continues indefinitely

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

what policies increase prosocial behavior an experiment with referees at the journal of public economics the peer review process familiar to all academic researchers offers a classic example of the positive externalities from prosocial behavior the reviewer bears the costs from submitting a high quality referee report quickly while the gains to the authors of the paper and to society from the knowledge produced are potentially large we evaluate the impacts of economic and social incentives on peer review using an experiment with 1 500 referees at the journal of public economics the specific aim of the experiment is to understand how to improve the speed and quality of peer review an issue of particular importance to the economics profession given the slowdown of the publishing process ellison 2002 our broader objective is to evaluate commonly used methods of increasing prosocial behavior and to test the predictions of competing theories in our experiment we randomly assign referees to four groups a control group with a six week 45 day deadline to submit a referee report a group with a four week 28 day deadline a cash incentive group rewarded with 100 for meeting a four week deadline and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would be publicly posted the experiment yields four sets of results first shortening the deadline from six weeks to four weeks reduces median review times from 48 days to 36 days because missing the deadline has no direct

what determines the decision to implement emas a european firm level study empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed on us and japanese companies for europe which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major markets similar research is lacking this paper seeks to fill this gap by empirically investigating business and financial characteristics stakeholder pressures and public policies to distinguish companies that have implemented the european eco management and audit system emas from a unique firm level dataset of european publicly quoted companies we find that the emas participation decision is positively influenced by the solvency ratio the share of non current liabilities the average labour cost and the absolute company size as well as the relative size of a company compared to its sector average the profit margin exerts a negative influence we further find that companies whose headquarters is located in a country that actively encourages emas have a higher probability of participation finally this paper suggests that rather than attracting other kinds of companies a favourable institutional context succeeds in convincing more of the same kind of companies to participate

the imf and precautionary lending an empirical evaluation of the selectivity and effectiveness of the flexible credit line abstract this paper provides an empirical evaluation of the flexible credit line fcl the imf s prime precautionary lending instrument since 2009 to which so far only mexico colombia and poland have subscribed we consider both questions of selectivity and effectiveness first which variables explain the three countries participation in fcl arrangements and second to which extent has the fcl delivered on its promise of boosting market confidence in its respective users based on a probit analysis we show that fcl selectivity can be explained by both demand and supply side factors the probability of participation in the fcl was greater in countries that experienced larger prior exchange market pressures that had lower bond spreads and inflation that accounted for higher shares in us exports and that exhibited a higher propensity of making political concessions to the us using a synthetic control approach we find evidence for some but generally limited beneficial effects on sovereign bond spreads and gross capital inflows into the three fcl countries overall our results suggest that any economic stigma that may prevent eligible countries from entering into an fcl arrangement is unwarranted conversely the apparent link of fcl participation with us interests is not conducive to overcoming political stigma

the review process in economics is it too fast rewards for publications in good economics journals are very high and submission fees and other monetary costs associated with submitting an existing manuscript are low consequently the editorial delay especially the first response time the time until the first editorial decision by postponing monetary rewards to publication constitutes the major submission cost from the author s perspective reducing the delay will induce many additional submissions of low quality papers to good journals increasing significantly the workload of editors and referees moreover the rejection rate will increase and cause papers to be rejected more times before publication offsetting at least some of the shorter first response times as a result the efforts of many editors to reduce the editorial delay although attracting more submissions to their journals may have adverse effects from a social perspective and the optimal delay might be longer than the current average of four months

uncertainty measures for economics journal impact factors academic economists appear to be intensely interested in rankings of journals institutions and individuals yet there is little discussion of the uncertainty associated with these rankings to illustrate the uncertainty associated with citations based rankings i compute the standard error of the impact factor for all economics journals with a five year impact factor in the 2011 journal citations report i use these to derive confidence intervals for the impact factors as well as ranges of possible rank for a subset of thirty journals i find that the impact factors of the top two journals are well defined and set these journals apart in a clearly defined group an elite group of 9 11 mainstream journals can also be fairly reliably distinguished the four bottom ranked journals are also fairly clearly set apart for the remainder of the distribution confidence intervals overlap and rankings are quite uncertain jel a14

sovereign debt buybacks can lower bargaining costs abstract i consider models were bargaining costs between debtors and creditors are large when debts are large the reason is that creditors are willing to spend more resources convincing the debtor that they are tough when they have more at stake also the sanctions which are sometimes triggered when bargaining fails to produce an agreement are larger when debts are larger in both cases debt repurchases by highly indebted sovereign nations can be advantageous for all parties moreover donors who subsidize buybacks can increase overall welfare more than donors who make direct gifts

economic research evolves fields and styles we examine the evolution of economics research using a machine learning based classification of publications into fields and styles the changing field distribution of publications would not seem to favor empirical papers but economics empirical shift is a within field phenomenon even fields that traditionally emphasize theory have gotten more empirical empirical work has also come to be more cited than theoretical work the citation shift is sharpened when citations are weighted by journal importance regression analyses of citations per paper show empirical publications reaching citation parity with theoretical publications around 2000 within fields and journals however empirical work is now cited more

the impact of economics on management abstract this article analyzes the impact of economics on management by examining citations of 71 management journals aer jpe econometrica and qje have the highest impact industrial organization journals also have a particularly large impact the share of economics in management citations drops from 9 91 percent until 1995 to 5 70 percent for 1996 2005 three possible explanations for this decrease are analyzed economics research became more mathematical because management is a younger discipline it grew faster than economics in quantity and quality of research and interdisciplinary spillover of research is slower than the spillover within a discipline only the second explanation is supported by the data

sovereign debt a primer the troublesome debts of many developing countries have spawned much literature on why countries borrow on what debt contributes to growth on why countries repay and on how to deal with existing debt the author provides an analytical primer on the following aspects of sovereign debt 1 the basic accounting concepts associated with debt and some data associated with external borrowing 2 debt as a component of an optimizing model of borrowing in a competitive loan market when the borrower faces an intertemporal budget constraint 3 debt as a component of recent models of endogenous growth 4 problems arising from sovereign risk including problems of liquidity enforcement and revenue raising to finance repayment 5 incentives to repay 6 options available to a creditor whose debtor is unwilling to meet current debt service obligations and 7 debt buybacks the author concludes that in the absence of any efficiency cost imposed by outstanding debt how much a buyback benefits the borrower depends on how much buying back debt reduces what is available for repayment later the author also concludes that if there are efficiency losses associated with debt debt forgiveness can benefit both a debtor nation and its creditors contrary to claims in the literature this outcome does not require that a reduction in the face value of debt raise its market value and the debtor benefits even though the buyback raises the market price of the debt

fishes ponds and productivity student advisor matching and early career publishing success for economics phds i introduction research productivity is an important concern for members of the academe publishing success is important for individual departments because more productive faculty increases the department s research profile which in turn increases the department s professional reputation as evidence thursby 2000 and ehrenberg and hurst 1998 find that a department s reputation in the national research council nrc ratings increases with published research while smyth 1999 finds that pages published in the top 5 journals have a greater impact than pages published in other journals publishing success is important for individual faculty members because peer reviewed publications have long been shown to be economic currency for academic economists bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 moore newman and turnbull 1998 sauer 1988 among others research promise is important for graduate students because students with the greatest promise for productive careers are likely to receive the best initial job placements buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 krueger and wu 2000 long 1978 indeed according to a survey of hiring departments carson and navarro 1988 every single top 20 domestic economics program considered the quality of one s research agenda to be of moderate to great importance in the hiring decision an important question then is how to identify which factors are associated with the likelihood of having a more productive research career to date empirical studies have focused on the program from which the student graduated recent examples include collins cox and stango 2000 davis huston and patterson 2001 stock and alston 2000 this focus implicitly assumes that because only the very best students become enrolled in elite programs graduates of highly ranked programs should hold the greatest promise for publishing success 1 in support coupe 2001 and buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that students graduating from top programs are more likely to publish in core economics journals while hogan 1981 finds that students graduating from programs with more active faculty publish more journal articles before placing total faith in these results however members of the academe should ask whether such findings hold across all points in the graduate distribution or whether they are only accurate predictors on average previously published data clearly suggest the latter for instance buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that 30 of tier 1 graduates do not publish any academic articles within the first 9 yr after phd receipt while 50 do not publish any top 50 articles as defined by liebowitz and palmer 1984 in other words there is a large amount of unexplained variability in the future success of a program s graduates krueger and wu 2000 93 consequently it is likely that significant overlap exists between the performance of top program graduates and lesser program graduates with significant portions of the latter outperforming significant portions of the former with this in mind the question becomes is there a readily observable factor that is a less noisy predictor of a student s likelihood for publishing success we argue that there is during a student s postgraduate education one of the most significant influences is his or her dissertation advisor we posit that for timing reasons advisors will possess additional insight into a student s true research potential that was not available to the admission committee when deciding whether to admit the student into the program consequently we expect a student s dissertation advisor to be a more informed predictor of his or her early career productivity than the program from which he or she receives the phd 2 in other words we believe that considering the identity of a student s dissertation advisor in addition to the quality of the program from which the student receives the phd should help reduce the uncertainty inherent in predicting the student s position within the early career productivity distribution

do journals accept too many papers abstract this paper provides a theoretical model for analyzing the behavior of peer reviewed journals it finds that apart from natural human errors inefficiencies arise purely for reasons of inter journal strategic behavior specifically as a result of competition journals tend to set their quality cut offs excessively low

ranking economics departments worldwide on the basis of phd placement an objective ranking of economics departments worldwide in terms of graduate education is derived the central idea is that the value of a department is the sum of the values of its phd graduates as reflected in the values of their current employing departments the scores are thus derived as solutions to a linear system of simultaneous equations in the values the sample includes the top fifty four departments the composition of which is determined endogenously using a criterion requiring a minimum of four placements in the departments comprising the sample two other related rankings are proposed which place more emphasis on more recent faculty recruitments the results point to a very high concentration in the economics phd education market worldwide confirming the dominance of the top u s departments in particular of harvard and m i t nevertheless a modest de concentration trend is under way the rankings are in close agreement with the 1994 national research council survey ranking based on the perceived quality of phd programs

catalysing private capital flows do imf programmes work as commitment devices in this article we examine whether imf programmes influence the ability of developing country issuers to tap international bond markets and if they improve spreads paid on the bonds issued we find that fund programmes do not provide a uniformly favourable signalling effect instead the evidence is most consistent with a positive effect of imf programmes when they are viewed as likely to lead to policy reform and when undertaken before economic fundamentals have deteriorated significantly the size of the fund s programme matters but the credibility of a joint commitment by the country and the imf appears to be critical enhancing its members access to international capital markets is widely regarded as an important objective of the international monetary fund imf or fund though the objective is not an explicitly stated purpose in the fund s articles of agreements the flow of international capital is essential to such stated purposes as the stability of the international monetary system efficient trade and productive resource use and to providing confidence when a member country experiences difficulties with its balance of payments 1 the fund s interest in private international capital flows has moreover increased over the last decade reflecting this evolution the fund s former managing

the value of tax progressivity evidence from survey experiments abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate how people value tax progressivity more precisely i study the potential trade off between any improvement in the final income distribution and the progressivity of the tax schedule to do this i designed survey experiments in which respondents were asked to rank or to choose between different taxation redistribution schemes with different treatments varying in terms of information availability 1 when only information about final incomes is provided and 2 when information about average tax rates is also available using a within subject design the instability of rankings between 1 and 2 indicates whether or not respondents value tax progressivity i find that information about tax rates significantly affects respondents judgments about tax schemes they exhibit a strong preference for tax progressivity i e they accept a fall in the quality of the final income distribution in exchange for progressive taxation the results of an additional treatment suggest that the mere fact of providing new information cannot account for this finding

evolution of social norms with heterogeneous preferences a general model and an application to the academic review process abstract the article presents a model of social norm evolution that suggests how the increase in optimal and actual first response times frt of economics journals can be related when the optimal frt and the norm about how much time refereeing should take increase it seems that the existence of a norm increases the average refereeing time the model suggests the surprising result that this is not necessarily true i also discuss applications of the model in other contexts differences in the optimal frt between disciplines the effects of the frt on the tenure process and strategic behavior of referees

secret buy backs of ldc debt we analyze the buy back of its debt by an ldc contrary to previous analyses of this subject we assume that the debtor can hide its transactions behind the veil of a fictitious operator the banks we assume cannot discriminate intra bank transactions from buy backs by the debtor itself with this assumption the lenders set the price by rationally taking account of the country s incentive to repurchase its debt will the debtor undertake a buy back of its debt the answer is a qualified yes large buy backs will take place

the slowdown in first response times of economics journals can it be beneficial the first response time henceforth frt of economics journals has increased over the last four decades from 1 2 months to 3 6 months the optimal frt however is not zero because the frt deters submission of mediocre papers to good journals and consequently saves valuable time of referees and editors the change in the actual frt is in the same direction as the change in the optimal frt which has increased because of the availability of research on the internet prior to publication and because the costs of refereeing a paper have increased

getting closer or drifting apart advances in communication and transportation technologies have the potential to bring people closer together and create a global village however they also allow heterogenous agents to segregate along special interests which gives rise to communities fragmented by type rather than geography we show that lower communication costs should always decrease separation between individual agents even as group based separation increases each measure of separation is pertinent for distinct types of social interaction a group based measure captures the diversity of group preferences that can have an impact on the provision of public goods an individual measure correlates with the speed of information transmission through the social network that afiects for example learning about job opportunities and new technologies we test the model by looking at coauthoring between academic economists before and during the rise of the internet in the 1990s

initial labor market conditions and long term outcomes for economists each year graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia one might expect that long term labor market outcomes for students graduating in unfavorable climates will resemble long term outcomes for those graduating in favorable climates in this paper i analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions at graduation initial job placement and long term outcomes for ph d economists from seven programs using macroeconomic conditions as an instrument for initial placement i show that a quality and type of initial job have a causal effect on long term job characteristics i also show that better initial placement increases research productivity which helps to limit the set of economic models that can explain the effect of initial placement on long term jobs

budget support versus project aid a theoretical appraisal should donors interested in the effectiveness of developmental programmes rely on conditional budget support or on project aid to answer this question we present a model in which only a subset of developmental expenditures can be subject to conditionality we show that budget support is preferable to project aid when the preferences of donors and recipients are aligned and when assistance is small relative to the recipients own resources furthermore when donors cannot observe the recipient s type they may impose higher levels of conditionality to separate committed governments from uncommitted ones

sovereign debt repurchases no cure for overhang troubled debtor countries do not gain by repurchasing external bank debt at market discount even if a buyback would stimulate investment by relieving debt overhang the reason is that buybacks allow creditors to reap more than 100 percent of any efficiency gains that might result from increased investment we show that open market buybacks provide a benchmark for evaluating more complex negotiated buyback deals by comparing any given deal with a hypothetical market buyback of the same size one can derive upper and lower bounds on the gain to the country we apply our model to the 1990 mexican debt deal

viewpoint replication in economics this examination of the role and potential for replication in economics points out the paucity of both pure replication checking on others published papers using their data and scientific replication using data representing different populations in one s own work or in a comment several controversies in empirical economics are used to illustrate how and how not to behave when replicating others work the incentives for replication are examined and proposals aimed at journal editors and authors are advanced that might stimulate an activity that most economists applaud but few perform

economics an emerging small world we study the evolution of social distance among economists over the period 1970 2000 while the number of economists has more than doubled the distance between them which was already small has declined significantly the key to understanding the short average distances is the observation that economics is spanned by a collection of interlinked stars a star is an economist who writes with many other economists most of whom have few coauthors and generally do not write with each other

epa s voluntary 33 50 program impact on toxic releases and economic performance of firms abstract this paper examines the motivations for participation in the voluntary 33 50 program and the program s impact on the toxic releases and economic performance of firms in the u s chemical industry it demonstrates that the benefits due to public recognition and the potentially avoided costs of liabilities and compliance under mandatory environmental regulations provide strong incentives for participation after controlling for sample selection bias and the impact of other firm specific characteristics this paper shows that program participation led to a statistically significant decline in toxic releases over the period 1991 93 the program also had a statistically significant negative impact on the current return on investment of firms but its impact on the expected long run profitability of firms was positive and statistically significant

imf conditionality as a screening device a theoretical model is developed in which adoption of an imf programme signals a country s productivity it is assumed that there are two types of country one with a high return on investment and the other with a low return the country s type is known only to itself in the presence of a debt overhang the high productivity country may choose not to undertake the investment despite it being socially efficient to do so in this case the creditor would like to offer the country some debt reduction but the low productivity type will also benefit from the debt reduction this problem can be avoided if the country has sufficient resources to engage in a debt buyback in order to gain the debt relief only the high productivity type would be prepared to sacrifice current resources for the debt reduction and thus a separation of the types is achieved this is similar to an argument found in acharya and diwan 1993 we argue however that it is unlikely that a heavily indebted country will have sufficient resources for a buyback if the country is credit constrained an alternative screening mechanism is to undertake an imf programme in return for debt reduction and possibly an imf loan this mechanism can be the equilibrium outcome even if the programme creates only disutility for the country s policy makers

are delays in academic publishing necessary researchers perpetually complain about long decision lags glenn ellison 2002a b confirms that delays are being longer he suggests an evolving social norm as a possible explanation with more demands made on authors for their work to be published time delays have the additional effect however of limiting the flow of submissions in the absence of time delays and other significant submission costs the best strategy is to start at the most prestigious journal and work down until the article is accepted better journals are unlikely to welcome this the major submission cost is the long and unpredictable length of time spent waiting for a decision ellison notes that time lags are longer for the top five economics journals at around six to eleven months longer than the rest despite the increasing prestige of top journals the number of submissions remains fairly static

investment in energy efficiency do the characteristics of firms matter the literature on energy efficiency provides numerous examples of apparently profitable technologies that are not universally adopted yet according to the standard neoclassical theory of investment profit maximizing firms should undertake all investments with a positive net present value the standard theory also holds that the discount rate for computing the present value of a project should be the return available on other projects in the same risk class and therefore should not depend on characteristics of the firm this model as applied to energy saving investments is tested by examining whether firms characteristics influence their decision to join the environmental protection agency s voluntary green lights program a discrete choice regression is estimated over a large sample of participating and nonparticipating firms missing values in the data matrix are replaced with multiple imputations from a distribution estimated using the expectation maximization algorithm the results show that 1 sub

money talks supplementary financiers and international monetary fund conditionality what explains the changes in international monetary fund imf conditionality i argue that imf conditionality agreements are influenced by supplementary financiers the imf regularly relies on external financing to supplement its loans to countries facing payments imbalances as a result these supplementary financiers are able to exercise leverage over the imf and the design of its conditionality programs i consider the influence of one type of supplementary financier private financial institutions on imf conditionality conclusions are supported by a data set of 249 conditionality arrangements coded according to their terms and two case studies

why japanese firms choose to certify a study of managerial responses to environmental issues abstract this paper examines empirically the determinants that led large japanese manufacturers to 1 incorporate environmental goals in their decisions 2 obtain environmental certification iso 14001 and 3 become early adopters of environmental certification we estimate two sets of models 1 models based on a profit maximization assumption and 2 models which incorporate utility maximization arguments recognizing that managers values attitudes and beliefs may also influence firms decisions the empirical analysis suggests that while the costs and benefits of voluntary actions to enhance or protect the environment and the capacity to act are significant determinants of voluntary environmental commitment so are the environmental values beliefs and attitudes of managers

the relative impacts of economics journals 1970 1990 our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by john p sophocleus mark gwartney michele butler and scott ralston we received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from jon brunson and edward novak constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers financial supportfrom the faculty development committee at salisbury state university is gratefully acknowledged

english proficiency and labor market performance evidence from the economics profession this article investigates whether the global spread of the english language provides an inherent advantage to native english speakers this question is studied within the context of the economics profession where the impact of being a native english speaker on future publishing success is examined english speakers may have an advantage because they are writing in their native language the quality of writing is a crucial determinant of publishing success and all the top economics journals are published in english using a ranking of the world s top 2 5 of economists this article confirms that native english speakers are ranked 100 spots higher better than similar non native english speakers a variety of extensions examine and dispel many other potential explanations jel a11 j44 f66

differences in citation patterns across journal tiers the case of economics we study how citation patterns differ between journal tiers in economics concretely we analyze citations patterns of more than 6 000 economics research articles published in top five second tier and top field economics journals between 1992 and 1996 in line with previous literature we find that top five journals articles generally receive more citations and that the life cycles of those citations are longer however their influence in term of citations is overestimated in its first twenty five years since publication the median top five article accumulates 4 25 around 3 as many citations when compared to the second tier and top field median article we show that this ratio is strongly associated with the field of economics research e g this ratio is the lowest for econometric methods papers and with articles impact e g in all fields of economics research except for theory this ratio decreases sharply as one moves toward high impact articles in term of citations

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

how to write an effective referee report and improve the scientific review process author s berk jonathan b harvey campbell r hirshleifer david abstract the review process for academic journals in economics has grown vastly more extensive over time journals demand more revisions and papers have become bloated with numerous robustness checks and extensions even if the extra resulting revisions do on average lead to improved papers a claim that is debatable the cost is enormous we argue that much of the time involved in these revisions is a waste of research effort another cause for concern is the level of disagreement amongst referees a pattern that suggests a high level of arbitrariness in the review process to identify and highlight what is going right and what is going wrong in the reviewing process we wrote to a sample of former editors of the american economic review the journal of political economy the quarterly journal of economics econometrica the review of economic studies and the journal of financial economics and asked them for their thoughts about what might improve the process we found a rough consensus that referees for top journals in economics tend to make similar correctable mistakes the italicized quotations throughout this paper are drawn from our correspondence with these editors and our own experience their insights are consistent with our own experiences as editors at the journal of finance and the review of financial studies our objective is to highlight these mistakes and provide a roadmap for how to avoid them

an analysis of publication lags in econometrics this note describes the lengthening in publication lags for econometric papers in seven journals since 1986 and briefly considers ways of shortening them

the slowdown of the economics publishing process over the last three decades there has been a dramatic slowdown of the publication process at top economics journals a substantial part is due to journals requiring more extensive revisions various explanations are considered democratization of the review process increases in the complexity of papers growth of the profession and cost and benefit arguments changes in the profession are examined using time series data connections between these changes and the slowdown are examined using paper level data there is evidence for some explanations but most of the slowdown remains unexplained changes may reflect evolving social norms

page limits on economics articles evidence from two journals abstract over the past four decades the median length of the papers published in the top five economic journals has grown by nearly 300 percent we study the effects of a page limit policy introd

imf lending programs participation and impact abstract participation in imf programs has been an option that more and more developing countries have exercised in recent years in this paper a detailed analysis of such participation over the period 1976 1986 provides a number of insights into the motivations for and the macroeconomic effects of such participation participation is driven by a combination of past performance present external influences and sluggish adjustment of developing countries the ability to predict which countries will participate in the imf program is quite good with nearly 90 percent of variation in such choices accounted for by the explanatory variables employed increased participation has as contemporaneous effects a reduction in economic growth and domestic investment and an improvement in the current account lagged effects of increased participation on economic growth and domestic investment are positive and in most estimates quantitatively greater than the contemporaneous effects there is also evidence of significantly lower public investment an increased budget surplus and real depreciation of the exchange rate with increased participation results for domestic credit creation and government current expenditure although they have a sign consistent with more austere policy cannot be shown to be significantly different from those not participating

how can imf policy eliminate country moral hazard and account for externalities abstract costly crisis prevention has positive external effects which leads to free riding of governments on each other s efforts ordinary imf loans aggravate existing externalities reinforcing the under investment problem we consider the reform proposals of the meltzer commission in both loan and insurance models and show how the imf can eliminate country moral the efficiency ensuring loan policy accounts for given externalities and involves effort contingent discounts on interests or the extension of credit volume similar results hold for the insurance framework ex ante participation requires that smaller countries be subsidized by large ones or that imf policy consider distributional aspects in addition to efficiency

the inside scoop acceptance and rejection at the journal of international economics abstract there is little work on the inner workings of journals what factors seem to affect the ability to publish in a journal could simple rules which are already used by some journals like the desk rejection of a significant minority of papers help to streamline the process at what cost how well do journals seem to do in choosing papers what can we say about the extent of type 1 and type 2 errors do editors seem to have uniform standards or are some harsher than others we use data on submissions to the journal of international economics to help answer these questions

financing vs forgiving a debt overhang abstract this paper examines the tradeoffs facing creditors of a country whose debt is large enough that the country cannot attract voluntary new lending if the country is unable to meet its debt service requirements out of current income the creditors have two choices they can finance the country lending at an expected loss in the hope that the country will eventually be able to repay its debt after all or they can forgive reducing the debt level to one that the country can repay the post 1983 debt strategy of the imf and the us has relied on financing but many current calls for debt reform call for forgiveness instead the paper shows that the choice between financing and forgiveness represents a tradeoff financing gives the creditors an option value if the country turns out to do relatively well creditors will not have written down their claims unnecessarily however the burden of debt distorts the country s incentives since the benefits of good performance go largely to creditors rather than itself the paper also shows that the tradeoff itself can be improved if both financing and forgiveness are made contingent on states of nature that the country cannot affect such as oil prices world interest rates etc

solvency runs sunspot runs and international bailouts abstract this paper introduces a model of intervention by an international financial institution ifi under asymmetric information the ifi is unable to distinguish between runs due to fundamentals and those which are the result of pure sunspots however it maximizes global welfare by offering a relending package consistent with generating a separating equilibrium where voluntary creditor participation implies that underlying fundamentals are good the need for direct ifi lending in the package is shown to depend on the commitment capacity of creditors this adverse selection problem provides an alternative rationale for bagehot s principle of last resort lending at high rates of interest to the moral hazard motivation commonly found in the literature

on publication refereeing and working hard we present a model for academia with heterogeneous author types and endogenous effort to evaluate recent changes in the publication process in economics we analyze the implications of these developments on research output lowering the precision of refereeing signals lowers the effort choices of intermediate ability authors but invites more submissions from less able authors increasing the number of journals stimulates less able authors to submit their papers the editor can improve the journal s quality pool of submitted manuscripts by improving the precision of refereeing but not by lowering acceptance standards the submission strategy of an author is informative of his ability

a sceptic s comment on the study of economics a survey was carried out among two groups of undergraduate economics students and four groups of students in mathematics law philosophy and business administration the main survey question involved a conflict between profit maximisation and the welfare of the workers who would be fired to achieve it significant differences were found between the choices of the groups the results were reinforced by a survey conducted among readers of an israeli business newspaper and phd students of harvard it is argued that the overly mathematical methods used to teach economics encourage students to lean towards profit maximisation

comments on economic models economics and economists remarks on economics rules by dani rodrik this essay reviews dani rodrik s superb book economics rules and argues that it can serve as an ideal platform for discussing what economists can and should accomplish the essay comments on some of the major issues in contemporary economics examined in the book whether economics is a science the meaning of economic models the nature of facts in economics and others it also touches on issues that the book overlooks such as the sociology of the profession the teaching curriculum in economics and the dismal situation of publishing in economics

the influence of economics articles on business research analysis of journals and time trends this article examines the influence of economics on business research using citation data the share of economics in citations from business is 10 78 until 1995 but only 6 95 for 1996 2003 four potential explanations for this decline are discussed interdisciplinary spillover of research is slower than within a discipline the increasing use of mathematics in economics made economics less useful for business scholars economics articles are by their nature more long lived than business articles business has grown recently more quickly than economics the data support the second and fourth explanations different research spillover occurs but lasts no more than two years

holdouts in sovereign debt restructuring a theory of negotiation in a weak contractual environment negotiations between a country in default and its international creditors are modeled as a dynamic game in an environment of weak contractual enforcement the country cannot borrow internationally until it settles with all creditors delay arises in equilibrium as creditors engage in strategic hold up the model a rms the conventional wisdom that delay increases with more creditors and with the advent of vulture creditors contrary to conventional wisdom putting collective action clauses into bond contracts may increase delay via free riding on negotiation costs even while preventing strategic holdup and reducing total negotiation costs secondary debt markets consolidate debt with high and disperse debt with low creditor bargaining power whether secondary markets reduce or increase delay depends on the interaction between strategic holdup and debt

the effects of publication lags on life cycle research productivity in economics we investigate how increases in publication delays have affected the life cycle of publications of recent ph d graduates in economics we construct a panel dataset of 14 271 individuals who were awarded ph d s between 1986 and 2000 in u s and canadian economics departments for this population of scholars we amass complete records of publications in peer reviewed journals listed in the jel a total of 368 672 observations we find evidence of significantly diminished productivity in recent relative to earlier cohorts when productivity of an individual is measured by the number of aer equivalent publications diminished productivity is less evident when the number of aer equivalent pages is used instead our findings are consistent with earlier empirical findings of increasing editorial delays decreasing acceptance rates at journals and a trend toward longer manuscripts this decline in productivity is evident in both graduates of top 30 and non top 30 ranked economics departments and may have important implications for what should constitute a tenurable record we also find that the research rankings of top economics departments are a surprisingly poor predictor of the subsequent research rankings of their ph d s graduates jel a11 j24 j29 j44