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