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on Sociology of Economics |
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Issue of 2014‒07‒21
two papers chosen by Jonas Holmström Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration |
| By: | Yann Giraud; Pedro Garcia Duarte (Université de Cergy-Pontoise, THEMA; University of sao Paulo, Economics Department) |
| Abstract: | Some historians argue that the history of economic thought (HET) is useful and important to economists and that historians should remain in economics departments. Others believe that historians’ initiatives toward economists are doomed in advance to failure and that they should instead ally themselves with historians and sociologists of science located in humanities departments. Generally, the contributions that are devoted to reviewing the state of HET take a firm side for either one of these two positions and therefore have a prescriptive view on how history should be written. By contrast, our paper proposes a descriptive account of the kind of contributions to HET that have been published in major economics journals over the past two decades. To avoid definitional issues over HET, we use the B category of the JEL classification to retrieve and analyze the relevant literature. We show that, though contributions to HET are still found in top economics journals, the rate of publication of such papers has become increasingly uneven and the methods and narrative styles they adopt are increasingly remote from that advocated in the sub-disciplinary literature. For this reason, historians who are still willing to address the economics’ community should be more interested in expanding the frontiers of their field rather than in trying to anticipate their targeted readers’ preferences. |
| Keywords: | history of economics, economics journals, American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Economic Journal |
| JEL: | B20 A14 B40 B29 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ema:worpap:2014-09&r=sog |
| By: | Raj Chetty; Emmanuel Saez; László Sándor |
| Abstract: | We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six week deadline to submit a referee report, a group with a four week deadline, a cash incentive group rewarded with $100 for meeting the four week deadline, and a social incentive group in which referees were told that their turnaround times would be publicly posted. We obtain four sets of results. First, shorter deadlines reduce the time referees take to submit reports substantially. Second, cash incentives significantly improve speed, especially in the week before the deadline. Cash payments do not crowd out intrinsic motivation: after the cash treatment ends, referees who received cash incentives are no slower than those in the four-week deadline group. Third, social incentives have smaller but significant effects on review times and are especially effective among tenured professors, who are less sensitive to deadlines and cash incentives. Fourth, all the treatments have little or no effect on agreement rates, quality of reports, or review times at other journals. We conclude that small changes in journals’ policies could substantially expedite peer review at little cost. More generally, price incentives, nudges, and social pressure are effective and complementary methods of increasing prosocial behavior. |
| JEL: | H23 H41 |
| Date: | 2014–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20290&r=sog |