A theory of self-selection in a market with matching frictions: An application to delay in refereeing times in economics journals

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.     

Citations,journal ranking and multiple authorships: evidence based on the top 300 papers in economics

Two propositions are examined with reference to the top 300 papers in economics journals in terms of citations as reported by RePec. The results show that while there is significant correlation between the quality of a journal and the number of top papers published in that journal, the correlation is far away from being perfect. Furthermore, citations are not related to the number of authors, which provides evidence against the proposition that multi-authored papers are typically of higher quality than single-authored papers. The results also cast a shadow of doubt on the soundness of the bucket classification of journals.     

RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS,ECONOMIC GROWTH AND CAUSALITY: JAPAN'S EXPERIENCE

Based on page counts of articles published in 60 quality economics journals, the role of research publications was examined for Japan. Economic growth is found to have causal effects on research publications. Impulse responses further indicate that economic growth promotes research outputs. A unique socioeconomic characteristic in Japan explains the causal directions found here.     

The CDM framework: knowledge recombination from an evolutionary viewpoint

ABSTRACT

Since Crepon, Duguet, and Mairesse published their ground-breaking article (‘Research, Innovation and Productivity: An Econometric Analysis at the Firm Level’, 1998), the CDM framework has known a large diffusion, despite being published in a non-indexed journal. The present study is an exploration of the spread and recombination of ‘knowledge’ in the ‘CDM universe’, comprising all papers in Scopus indexed journals citing CDM or/and CDM cited papers. We assess first the speed and range of diffusion of CDM and investigate next the ‘origins’ and further ‘genealogical’ make up of the knowledge recombinations within the CDM universe. We find that CDM is cited by a growing number of papers, which spread over a variety of fields, and that it compares very well with the most cited comparable articles in indexed journals in its domain of research. We further find that the CDM universe is mainly constituted of three large clusters and for each of them we are able to identify knowledge paths going from the CDM and earlier cited papers to the subsequent main citing papers. We intend to provide a detailed interpretation of these findings in future work.     

Evaluating The Research Output Of Australian Universities' Economics Departments

This paper presents measures of the research output of Australian economics departments. Our study covers the 640 academic staff at rank Lecturer and above in the 27 Australian universities with economics departments containing eight or more staff in April 2002. We construct publication measures based on journal articles, which can be compared with weighted publication measures, and citation measures, which can be compared with the publication measures. Our aim is to identify the robustness of rankings to the choice of method, as well as to highlight differences in focus of departments' research output. A striking feature of our measures is that the majority of economists in Australian university departments have done no research that has been published in a fairly long list of refereed journals over the last dozen years. They may publish in other outlets, but in any event their work is rarely cited. Thus, average research output is low because many academic economists in Australia do not view research as part of their job or, at least, suffer no penalty from failing to produce substantive evidence of research activity.     

Economics research in Canada: a long-run assessment of journal publications

Abstract.  We examine the publications of authors affiliated with an economics research institution in Canada in (1) the Top-10 journals in economics according to journals' impact factors, and (2) the Canadian Journal of Economics . We consider all publications in the even years from 1980 to 2000. Canadian economists contributed about 5% of publications in the Top-10 journals and about 55% of publications in the Canadian Journal of Economics over this period. We identify the most active research centres and identify trends in their relative outputs over time. Those research centres successful in publishing in the Top-10 journals are found to also dominate the Canadian Journal of Economics . Additionally, we check the robustness of our findings with respect to journal selection, and we present data on authors' PhD origin, thereby indicating output and its concentration in graduate education.     

学术杂志收费会导致质量下降吗

讨论了学术杂志为实现学术交流功能如何定价和控制文章质量。我们发现学术杂志对作者收费并不会影响文章质量。中国现有学术评价机制是影响学术杂志定价和质量控制的关键,过度关注研究数量的学术评价机制导致追求利润最大化的学术杂志丧失质量控制功能,造成乱收费、文章质量低下和读者流失。     

Incentives for Journal Editors

Scholars may become journal editors because editors may generate more citations of their own works. This paper empirically establishes that a scholar's publications are more likely to be cited by papers in a journal that is edited by the scholar. We then test if editors exercise influence on authors to cite editors’ papers by either pressuring authors (“editor‐pressure” hypothesis) or accepting articles with references to the editors’ papers (“editor‐selection” hypothesis), by using the keyword analysis and the forward citation analysis, respectively. We find no evidence for the two hypotheses, which leaves self‐selection as a possible cause for the editor effect. JEL classification: J01     

The state of research on technological uncertainties, social uncertainties and emerging markets: A multidisciplinary literature review

The objective of this research work is to study the progress of research on technological uncertainties, social uncertainties and emerging markets and outline and identify the key disciplines, journals, articles and authors. For this the author studied the existing literature from the various fields in which technological uncertainties, social uncertainties and emerging markets research work have been published using ISI Web of Knowledge database. The paper finds that there is increasing research work on technological uncertainties, social uncertainties and emerging markets and the bibliographical search resulted in ninety-one documents written by one-hundred-sixty-one authors in eighty-four journals in seventy-two disciplines. The five major disciplines and their underlying journals are business and economics, agriculture, psychology, public administration, and environmental sciences and ecology accounting for majority of publications. In journals the most prolific, measured by number of articles published are Harvard Business Review, Social Science and Medicine, World Development, and Higher Education; and most influential, measured by the global citation received, are Harvard Business Review, Social Science and Medicine and Sociological Review. The top 10% of the journals are responsible for 23% of all publications but 85% of all global citations received. This highlights that despite the high, diverse and increasing number of journals; only few are dominating and shaping the research arena of technological uncertainties, social uncertainties and emerging markets. Further, in the ten most cited articles, no author appears more than once.     

《财经研究》六十年大数据分析：中国经济学期刊发展的特点与趋势?

《财经研究》60年的命运和发展与中国的经济、高等教育、经济学和经济学期刊的发展息息相关。文章基于1956-2015年《财经研究》和其他经济学核心期刊的历史数据,从发文数量、被引频次、发文学科、发文栏目、发文区域、发文机构、发文作者和发文关键词等方面进行了横向与纵向的比较分析,研究发现：中国主要经济学期刊在发文学科、栏目选择和研究主题偏好上存在趋同现象,但各个期刊又都有自身的特色,形成了错位互补的发展态势,《财经研究》的强项是财务与会计、综合和金融等三个栏目,特色是财政分权、制度变迁、对外直接投资和中小企业等方面的研究;中国经济学期刊发展中存在的主要问题是国际化程度不高;中国经济学期刊充分体现了中国经济发展的重大历史命题和阶段性特征,新中国成立以来的众多重大社会经济变革问题都能在期刊中找到理论阐述和政策建议。总之,中国的经济学期刊不仅见证了中国60年的社会变迁和经济发展,而且也为建立中国特色的经济学话语体系做出了贡献。     

Research Ethics Education in Economics

Abstract

In this paper, we report the findings from the data we collected from a survey in order to measure how common research ethics education in economics is. We have found out that (1) research ethics is taught in only a very few economics departments around the globe; (2) topics related to research ethics are not taught in courses on economics and ethics; and (3) the number of papers published in specialised peer-reviewed journals on economics education is only a tiny fraction of the number of papers published in these journals. There has been no evidence in economics showing that economics departments have taken strong initiative on teaching research ethics to undergraduate and graduate students.     

James Buchanan's public economics: One proposition,two speculations and three queries

The text of this paper is substantially that presented to participants at the Buchanan-at-seventy conference. I have not attempted to recast the discussion along more conventional journal lines, because it has been decided to publish the conference papers in this supplementary volume in their original form. I have, however, made some modifications in the light of the conference discussion.     

Citation network analysis of organic LEDs

The field of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) is an emergent research domain because of both scientific interest in chemistry and condensed matter physics and industrial importance as flat panel displays. In this paper, we analyzed a citation network of OLED papers and used a topological clustering method to investigate the structure of research and to detect emerging research domains. We found that most papers belong to two main clusters: organics and polymers. These two clusters have distinctive differences in subcluster structures and journals where papers are published. Supposing this discrepancy to indicate research progress, organics are in the applied research stage, while polymers are in the basic research stage.     

A theory of citations

We propose a model in which researchers maximize the number of times they are cited in later papers. The equilibrium is inefficient, because researchers distort their effort toward writing on popular topics. This inefficiency is affected by various factors, policies and customs. We explored the effect of a variety of such factors. In particular, we argue that the inefficiency is likely to be higher in disciplines (areas of research) in which talent is uniform across topics rather than more topic specific. We also determine conditions under which assigning a higher weight to citations in papers published in higher-ranked journals enhances efficiency.     

Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) with publications in the area of academic efficiency studies: what are the historical roots of this research topic?

In this study, we explore the historical roots of the relatively new topic in scientometrics of academic efficiency assessments. We are interested in the contributions of researchers from the past which have been revealed as important for the topic in the long run. The technique of Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) has been recently introduced which is based on the analysis of the frequency with which references are cited in the publications of a specific research field (here: academic efficiency assessments). The study is based on papers conducted for a systematic review of empirical articles on technical efficiency in academic research production: 60 papers (published between 1992 and 2012) and 1314 cited references. Results indicated that 5 peaks are clearly identifiable until 2000. They correspond, respectively, to the years 1957 (The founding article of Farrell), 1978 (Proposition of a new promising approach: the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) by Charnes et al.), 1988 (Research-teaching multi-output model and integration of quality indicators), 1990 (DEA in the service of Research Assessment Exercise) and 1997 (Introduction of weight restrictions in DEA). The peaks are described with the underlying publications and recent developments (since 2000) in the area of academic efficiency studies are outlined.     

Data-mining: Improvement of university library services

Delft University Press has been contacted by the International Water History Association (client) in order to study the relevancy of starting a new journal on a particular topic of interest to its members. This periodical would publish most of the articles relating to this field. Before starting, the client and the publisher want to know if such a journal would find enough authors for the articles and a sufficient audience. How many potential authors exist? What amount of articles in that field exists in other journals? In order to get an answer, the Delft University of Technology Library performed basic bibliometric analyses.A study of all articles published in 6 relevant existing periodicals, selected by the client, shows that most of the authors were unknown to the client. An analysis of the publications of the members of the association revealed that only one-third has published in the past 10 years, and very few publications were in the client's field of interest. This would imply that a future periodical could not be supported only by contributions of the members. These preliminary analyses allowed the publisher and the client to get a clearer idea of the possible contribution of its members for a future periodical. The main contributors will have to be recruited from a larger population.     

Is it easier to publish in journals that have low impact factors?

We use publication data from all journals in economics, mathematics, physics and chemistry. We compute the ratio of publications that come from the top 25 US departments for each journal and use it as a measure of difficulty to publish in a journal. We find that there is a rather weak but positive correlation (0.20) between the impact factor and the difficulty measure.     

Regulation,Minimum Wage and Informality: Introduction to Symposium

Are markets in developing and transition economies over‐regulated or under‐regulated? This is a perennial question in the development discourse, but one for which answers appear to come more from preset ideology than from context‐specific analysis and evidence. These issues become even more pressing when the debate turns to the links between regulation, deregulation and inequality. The recent experience of rising inequality in many countries has also brought to the fore predictable policy positions. A key aspect of labor regulation in developing countries, and one becoming more prominent in the era of rising inequality, is the minimum wage. The range of issues around regulation, minimum wage and informality was addressed by papers presented to a conference held in New Delhi on December 17–18, 2014. The conference was co‐sponsored by the World Bank, UK Department for International Development, Cornell University and Columbia University. The organizers of the conference were Kaushik Basu, Stefan Dercon, Ravi Kanbur and Jan Svejnar. A selection of papers from the conference which passed the usual review procedures of the Review of Development Economics, and a further selection of papers from those submitted to the journal, form this symposium.     

Research Published by Australian Economics and Econometrics Departments: 1988-93*

This paper measures an important component of the research output of economics and econometrics teaching departments, namely, the number of pages published during the period 1988-93, in journals listed by the Journal of Economic Literature. Based on page counts it is found that department rankings are similar over a broad range of journal groupings. It is also found that the median numbers of pages published by each of the groups of senior lecturers, associate professors and professors are quite small, indicating that within these groups research output is highly concentrated among a few active publishers.     

ASSESSING THE RELATIVE IMPACTS OF ECONOMIC EDUCATION SCHOLARSHIP: AN APPLICATION OF THE HARZING DATABASE

Despite the rising prominence of economic education scholarship, little work has been done to document how economic education scholarship is faring in the academic world. Unlike prior research in this genre, this study assesses the relative impacts of economic education scholarship by examining published research in (strictly) economic education journals. In order to do so, we use the Harzing database of citations to articles published in (strictly) economic education journals from 1990 to the present. Supporting some of the measures found in prior research, we find that the Journal of Economic Education (JEE) is unambiguously the dominant source of influential scholarship in the field of economic education. Interestingly, the JEE's closest competitors among active economic education journals are the International Review of Economics Education and Computers in Higher Education Economics Research, both of which are published under the auspices of the Economics Network, which is located in the UK. Following these two journals in our ranking is the Journal of Economics and Finance Education, a relatively new journal launch.