Publishing in economics

Relying on rankings rather than reading to promote and reward young economists subverts the essential process of assessing and rewarding original research. Using the T5 to screen the next generation of economists incentivizes professional incest and creates clientele effects whereby career-oriented authors appeal to the tastes of editors and biases of journals. It diverts their attention away from basic research toward blatant strategizing about lines of research and favored topics of journal editors with long tenures. It raises entry costs for new ideas and persons outside the orbits of the journals and their editors.

Using data on articles published in the top-five economic journals in the period 1991 to 2010, we explore whether the gender composition of editorial boards is related to the publishing success of female authors and to the quality of articles that get published. Our results show that female editors reduce, rather than increase, the share of articles that are (co-)authored by females.

Some fields, such as microeconomics, econometrics, and experimental economics, are published in high quality journals, whereas macroeconomics, public economics, industrial organization, finance, health and urban economics, and development economics are published in journals that have lower quality weights than the average journal. Labor economics and economic history are published significantly better after 2000.