wage employment contracts this paper studies the efficient agreements about the dependence of workers earnings on employment when the employment level is controlled by firms the firms superior information about profitability conditions is responsible for this form of contract governance under plausible assumptions such agreements will cause employment to diverge from efficiency as a byproduct of their attempt to mitigate risk it is shown that if leisure is a normal good and firms are risk neutral employment is always above the efficient level such a one period implicit contracting model cannot therefore be used to explain unemployment as a rational byproduct of risk sharing between workers and a risk neutral firm under conditions of asymmetric information

a model of site specific nutrient management a model is introduced to answer three questions pertaining to site specific nutrient management in production of orchard crops which input factors of crop production are limiting yield what action should be taken to remove the limiting factors and what is the potential gain in revenue from taking the action our model captures the essence of the law of the minimum in that yield and revenue increase only if the limiting nutrients are adjusted an example of pear trees shows how to implement the method

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

price discrimination copyright law and technological innovation evidence from the introduction of dvds u s copyright law effectively prevents direct price discrimination for copyright holders that sell to different markets in response these firms can engage in indirect price discrimination i derive theoretical predictions about the use of indirect price discrimination and i analyze how optimal pricing strategies differ for different products using data on vhs and dvd movie distribution i find that firms pricing choices are consistent with the predictions of theory and that firms use of indirect price discrimination benefits consumers but harms ancillary retailers finally i examine what optimal pricing strategies might look like in a legal environment that permits direct price discrimination

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

how many more cites is a 3 000 open access fee buying you empirical evidence from a natural experiment we analyze the effect of open access oa status of journal articles on citations using cross sectional and panel data from mathematics and economics we perform negative binomial poisson and generalized method of moments instrumental variable methods regressions we benefit from a natural experiment via hybrid oa pilot agreements citations to pre prints allow us to identify the intrinsic quality of articles prior to journal publication overall our analysis suggests that there is no hybrid oa citation benefit however for the subpopulation of articles without oa pre or post prints we find positive hybrid oa effects for the full sample and each discipline separately jel l17 o33 a11

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

price discrimination in the subscription market for economics journals author affiliation yuqing zheng yuqzheng rti orgharry m kaiser hmk2 cornell edu acknowledgment this research was conducted when dr zheng was working as a research associate at the dyson school of applied economics and management of cornell university 1 introductionmost scientific journals charge a higher subscription price to institutional subscribers and a lower subscription price to individual subscribers such practice is often considered an issue of third degree price discrimination in the economics and library literature e g liebowitz 1985 phillips and phillips 2002 1 this article examines what factors affect the degree of price discrimination for an academic journal by analyzing data on 190 of the 208 economics journals indexed in the 2008 edition of journal citation reports compiled by the institute for scientific information jcr economics journals hereafter 2 the empirical literature on price discrimination in the market for journals is very limited we attempt to enrich this existing literature by providing insights primarily in the following three aspects price discrimination by journal governance for profit vs nonprofit status by publisher and by how the differences in journal pricing behavior in the respective library and individual markets lead to various degrees of price discrimination first it is well known that for profit journals fp journals often charge significantly higher library subscription prices than do comparable nonprofit journals nfp journals many studies have reported a price premium charged by fp journals e g bergstrom s 2001 study on economics journals and the study conducted by dewatripont et al 2007 on 22 fields of natural and social sciences what is less known is whether a fp journal is more discriminatory than a nfp journal that is the ratio of the price charged to libraries over that charged to individuals the library to individual price ratio henceforth could be higher for a fp journal than for a comparable nfp journal take the jcr economics journals in our data as an example we plot in figures 1 and 2 a journal s library to individual price ratio against its impact factor with figure 1 representing fp journals and figure 2 representing nfp journals for the 105 fp journals in our sample the average library to individual price ratio is 8 16 with a price ratio of 34 58 the champion goes to the journal of economic theory for the 85 nfp journals in the data the average and maximum library to individual price ratios are 4 13 and 14 03 respectively with the latter belonging to fiscal studies in this article after controlling for other factors affecting pricing behavior by publishers we examine whether the degree of price discrimination differs depending on whether a journal is fp or nfp as suggested in the two figures our results indicate that fp journals are more discriminatory indeed figure 1the library to individual price ratios for for profit journals n 105 figure omitted see article image figure 2the library to individual price ratios for nonprofit journals n 85 figure omitted see article image second we identify publisher heterogeneity in engaging in price discrimination which is informative to the library and academic communities but not known in the literature for jcr economics journals the major publishers include the four major commercial publishers elsevier wiley blackwell springer and taylor francis including routledge as well as various university presses and associations societies we allow for publisher conduct heterogeneity in conducting price discrimination and find that elsevier is the most discriminatory publisher among all groups followed by wiley blackwell third in addition to the library to individual price ratio the library price and individual price are estimated respectively

involuntary employment in contracts with risky job search involuntary employment in contracts with risky job search the implications of partially insurable job search risk for incentive compatibility in a standard contracting framework are explored when unemployment spells provoke job search workers face risk in spell duration and reemployment wages when search effort is not variable contracts including unemployment insurance will yield involuntary employment when search effort is diminished by ui benefits firms shift some compensation back to wages increasing the relative attractiveness of employment the analysis begins with a theorem on incomplete insurance by imai geanakoplos and ito 1981 for which a simple proof and economic intuition are provided i introduction in seminal models of contingent labor contracts azariadis 1975 and baily 1974 sought to explain the behavior of wages and employment over the business cycle much of the subsequent literature for example grossman and hart 1983 and hart 1983 has been devoted to exploring the impact of asymmetric information on such properties of contracting equilibria as over or underemployment wage flexibility and whether or not utility falls when a worker is fired this paper looks at the effects on contingent labor contracts of the asymmetry in risk faced on the one hand by workers who being laid off when the contract is implemented experience job search risk which is partially uninsured due to asymmetric information and on the other hand by workers who retaining their jobs return to a known status quo for the rest of the period in most contingent contracting models all relevant information about the prevailing state of nature is revealed at once and wage and employment levels are then determined once the contract is implemented there is no residual uncertainty this sequence of events agreement upon a contingent contract resolution of uncertainty determination of wages and employment is a reasonable approximation to the experience of workers who retain their jobs since they know their wages and their working conditions workers who are laid off however often face considerable risk over the effectiveness of job search and the terms of future employment this creates an asymmetry in the riskiness of the ex post outcomes of the contract job retention means no more uncertainty within the period while layoff entails further within period risk associated with job search and reemployment while severance pay or unemployment benefits can reduce some of the uncertainty associated with job loss they will not generally provide complete insurance this is because the intensity of job search and the arrival of job offers are private information since the firm cannot verify for example the intensity of job search it will insist that the worker bear some of the risk associated with the search s outcome this is a standard principal agent problem see for example shavell 1979 equilibrium labor contracts will therefore offer workers a gamble between job retention with no residual risk and layoff with some uninsured job search risk 1 this asymmetry in residual risk affects the contingent contracts workers enter into for example if workers feel more comfortable facing a given risk when their incomes are higher the residual risk associated with layoff may lead them to accept lower contingent wages in the employed state in exchange for greater severance pay when laid off a problem with this kind of modification of the standard contract i e one with no residual risk is that if enough compensation is shifted into the unemployed state expected utility may actually be higher for laid off workers than for those who are retained this is a situation with voluntary layoffs and involuntary employment at prevailing wages retained workers would rather be laid off if workers can increase their chances of being fired by behaving unproductively involuntary employment contracts may be unenforceable

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

price discrimination by a many product firm determining the optimal selling strategy for a multiproduct firm facing consumers with unknown tastes is a difficult task this paper aims to show how almost optimal nonlinear tariffs can often be found when the number of products becomes large

efficient contracts with costly adjustment short run employment determination for airline mechanics this paper presents an empirical analysis of firm specific employment and wage outcomes for mechanics in the domestic airlines industry a dynamic contracting model is presented that incorporates both costly employment adjustment and potential gaps between contract wage rates and the opportunity value of workers time the model gives a useful description of the employment output linkage in the data but is less successful in capturing the dynamic relation between employment contract wage rates and wage rates outside the airline industry copyright 1986 by american economic association

a location model with preference for variety we propose a new location model where consumers are allowed to make multiple purchases i e one unit from each firm this model may fit many markets e g newspapers credit cards better than existing models a common feature of these markets is that some consumers are loyal to one brand while others consume more than one product our model yields predictions consistent with this observation if firms are allowed to choose their locations on the interval then spatial differentiation may not be maximal and in some cases it may even be minimal thus under certain conditions we restore hotelling s principle of minimum differentiation

incomplete insurance and absolute risk aversion abstract suppose that a subset of states of nature are not verifiable individually given an optimal feasible insurance scheme the expected utility across a group of unverifiable states is greater less than that of a verifiable state if the degree of absolute risk aversion is decreasing increasing

open access journals and academics behavior the rising star of scholarly publishing is open access oa even some traditional journals now offer this option on author payment and many full freely accessible journals are now available to scholars providing relief to research institutions increasingly unable to afford the escalating subscription rates of serials however proper recognition of full oa journals by the community remains a major obstacle to overcome if they are to become a viable alternative for scholarly communication through a survey this work investigates economics scholars attitudes to oa and attempts to outline the state of practices and norms governing individuals publication choices jel l17 l86 o33

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

optimal labour contracts under asymmetric information an introduction the review of economic studies has instituted a new series of lectures to be given annually by a younger british economist at the association of university teachers of economics meetings the choice of lecturer is determined by a panel whose members are currently professors hahn mirrlees and nobay this paper is a revised version of the first lecture in the series it was presented at the aute meeting held at the university of surrey in april 1982 and was refereed in the usual way mak

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

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

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

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

the distinguishing characteristics of temporary and permanent layoffs this paper develops a theory of layoffs in an intertemporal setting in which job separations may occur in each of several successive periods theoretical analysis of temporary layoffs in previous studies has been limited to models in which the layoffs occur only in the final period of the model this multiperiod implicit contract framework enables us to identify distinguishing characteristics of temporary and permanent layoffs that were heretofore blurred or distorted in previous contract analyses

the generalized malmquist index and capacity utilization change an application to the italian manufacturing 1989 1994 several indices of plant capacity utilization based on the concept of best practice frontier have been proposed in the literature fare et al 1992 de borger and kerstens 1998 this paper suggests an alternative measure of capacity utilization change based on generalized malmquist index proposed by grifell tatje and lovell in 1998 the advantage of this specification is that it allows the measurement of productivity growth ignoring the nature of scale economies afterwards this index is used to measure capacity change of a panel of italian firms over the period 1989 94 using data envelopment analysis and then its abilities of explaining the short run movements of output are assessed

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

evidence on the accuracy of merger simulations this paper evaluates the efficacy of a structural model of oligopoly used for merger review using premerger data we estimate several demand systems and use a static bertrand model to simulate the price effects of two mergers using pre and postmerger data we directly estimate the price effects the direct estimates imply that one merger resulted in moderate price increases while the second left prices essentially unchanged while some simulations are similar to the directly estimated price effects overall simulations overstate the price effects in one case and understate them in the other explanations for the discrepancies are explored

job search and the duration of layoff unemployment this paper derives an optimal job searching strategy for workers on layoff and an optimal recall policy for firms when each side anticipates the other side s actions correctly it shows that workers search for an alternative job only if the probability of recall falls below a critical level and that firms may recall before the recovery of demand depending on the costs of laying off and hiring workers and the probability of losing workers on layoff through the use of optimal job searching and recall policies the paper derives expressions for the duration of layoff unemployment and discusses briefly their comparative static properties

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

labor contracts with voluntary quits this paper considers labor contracts between the risk neutral firm and risk averse workers with heterogeneous outside opportunities alternative wages which become known to the worker after a costly on the job search in the case of a deterministic alternative wage self selection over a menu of contract wages would achieve the first best contract if the alternative wages are stochastic the second best contract emerges as a trade off between productive efficiency and risk sharing workers who voluntarily search are fewer and workers who search are less likely to quit if the search effort is not monitored even fewer workers search

job search and implicit contracts a model incorporating costly search and implicit contracts is examined the contracts differ from those studied in the traditional literature by allowing for both temporary and permanent layoffs a natural rate of unemployment is determined and comparative statics analysis shows that changes in the utility value of leisure in the cost of search and in the dispersion of prices each have an ambiguous effect on this natural rate

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

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

on employer specific information and internal labor markets the human capital literature of which becker s 2 paper is the seminal work stresses the productivity enhancing effects of schooling and on the job training later work by spence 21 and others emphasizes the fact that it is difficult for employers to ascertain the productivity of potential employees and suggests that activities such as schooling may provide employers with signals as to workers productivities in the signalling literature it is assumed that information generated concerning an individual s abilities is general in that it is known to all potential employers yet the information that an employer gathers concerning his workers abilities is not likely to be completely transferable to other employers as a consequence as rosen 18 249 points out there are limitations on the ability of the price system to achieve efficient assignments if the price system is incomplete there is a role for entrepreneurial activity of assembling an optimal work force this paper analyzes the employment relations that arise when employers information concerning new workers abilities is incomplete until after a period of employment the acquisition of such employer specific information is shown to lead to what has been referred to in the literature as internal labor markets internal labor markets as identified by dunlop 5 32 are the complex of rules which determine the movement of workers among job classifications within administrative units these movements may be transfers promotions demotions or layoffs to the exterior labor markets doeringer and piore 3 emphasize skill specificity and on the job training as the key factors in the emergence of the internal labor market along similar lines williamson wachter and harris 22 point out that job idiosyncracy can result in employment relations with attributes like those of internal labor markets by way of contrast this paper emphasizes the role of employer specific information in generating internal labor markets the theory provides an explanation as to why employers dismiss current employees at the same time that new employees are hired evidence that dismissal rates are not insignificant is presented in section iv the theory also provides a new rationale for long term em

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

pricing of scientific journals and market power we analyze the empirical relationship between journal prices their quality measured by their citation counts their age as well as conduct of publishers the database covers 22 scientific fields and over 2600 among the most highly reputed and cited journals in 2003 we show that a for profit journals charge roughly 3 times more than journals run by scientific societies b the number of citations has a positive impact on prices c there are large differences in prices across fields that vary from 1 and 6 these are highly and positively correlated with the degree of concentration in the industry

the incentive implications of incomplete insurance the multiplicative case abstract when states of nature are not completely verifiable and payments in a pareto efficient insurance scheme contribute multiplicatively to wealth the insured may be better off in the insured against event depending upon the behavior of relative risk aversion

academic journal pricing and the demand of libraries the prices of for profit academic journals have increased rapidly over the past decade barbara albee and brenda dingley 2001 there remains substantial debate as to the explanation for these increases among those put forward are the increased concentration of the journal industry see e g mccabe 2002 and the relatively recent effort by major publishers to bundle print and electronic journals aaron s edlin and rubinfeld 2004 while both explanations are undoubtedly important what is missing is the significant role of the primary customers of journal publishers the academic libraries as agents of college and university faculties libraries serve the interests of their principals while having only limited information about faculty journal demands facing little or no hard budget constraint faculty are unlikely or unwilling to make difficult allocative choices as a result libraries have been making hard choices for years between journals and books and among journals in a world of increasing budgetary pressure given that electronic transmission of knowledge is becoming increasingly important an understanding of the reasons for the increases in journal prices is a vital element in the ongoing discussion of best mechanisms by which scholarly communications can be disseminated in this paper we formulate a model of library journal demand and suggest how it can be used to analyze the optimal pricing of journals by publishers this represents part of a larger project whose long range goal is to explain the pattern of journal pricing over time and to evaluate two broad policy questions i to what extent have mergers and or bundling practices been responsible for the increase in journal prices ii to what extent are journal prices likely to change in response to changing library acquisition strategies reallocation of budgets between serials and books journal sharing among libraries setting hard budgets etc