One hundred years of AER

 "This paper presents a list of the top 20 articles published in the American Economic Review during its first 100 years. This list was assembled in honor of the AER's one-hundredth anniversary by a group of distinguished economists at the request of AER's editor. A brief description accompanies the citations of each article."

 ***

"Written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review, this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its members, one of which is the Review. Early in its history the Review was a multipurpose publication with highly disparate content. Over time the economics profession expanded and more economics research was produced, primarily in the form of journal articles. Editors accommodated this shift by allocating more resources to the refereeing and editing process and more space to research papers."

Sunday night econlinks: Submit the paper right now!

• The Tilburg Univ "Econ Schools Ranking". It is indeed using a rather decent pool of journals (for period 2004-2008) and moreover, you can construct your own top by choosing subsets of those journals (such as top 5 only, if you wish). Not a bad idea.

• Tabarrok on the issue of publishing referee reports. This by no means new, in fact I also had a few thoughts on this, inspired by others (inter alia, former editors at top journals, e.g., the PNAS) who had had such ideas etc.

• A pity they decided to close before I managed to assess them... While I honestly hope Ferran Adrià will revisit this decision, I cannot help noticing that this simply paves the way for the would-be King of Restaurants: El Bulli is dead, long live Noma! I promise to tell you more about Noma in the first week of April.

• (A noteworthy) LEAP forward at Harvard (via Al Roth, at Market Design). The sort of interesting academic initiatives that European universities would be wise to imitate (hope dies last)...

• Art catastrophes happen everywhere, quite frequently.

• The sustainable, meat-eating, vegetarians. And, (in a funny way) related, a great "Hústorta" short movie, by a promising young director, Jakab-Benke Nándor (with thanks to Dan). By the way, this Toldi restaurant in Cluj Napoca, on Clinicilor 23, (tried for the first time with the occasion of my recent trip there) is indeed a place where they know how to prepare meat. In general. So if you want good meat, definitely a place to try. The problem is that there is not much else than meat there... Literally. And they could do so much more. The service and ambiance are pretty decent, though they could invest in more/better marketing (online included, for instance).

• An ancient rejection letter (and more background to it). Would be a pity if this were not submitted to Economic Inquiry (first bullet point), for instance.

• Good: Jay McInerney apparently takes over the wine column at WSJ. Let us hope he's gonna be as entertaining as in Bacchus & me (first bullet point).

• Time to put all these culinary-links-Chicago in order and save for future reference, before I get there (blame the EU Commission if I am late): Chicago's great culinary middle ground. Assuming I will not go every second day to Avec (which I've tried twice by now) and above (looking very much forward to).

• Posner and Becker on consumer competence, in particular about whether any regulation concerning obesity is necessary. Or proof of the fact that Becker has a Nobel in Economics, while Posner only believes he should get one...

• And, finally for today, under the heading "Econ work is never over", this is a perfect advice for people like myself: "Submit the paper right now! Submit the paper right now!" Brilliant. Via Jeff Ely, at Cheaptalk.

It's always the 3rd referee!

Even in 1945...
(with thanks to Alex and YouTube)

Weekend econlinks

• Sharing information in scientific research: yes/no/when. Interesting, but the analysis here is applicable only in the context of some sciences (arguably, not most). Moreover, sharing by means of co-authorship is discussed at best indirectly (if one is willing to expand on their repeated interaction game thread...). But my major "disagreement" has to do with their upshot: my conjecture is that know-how sharing is, ceteris paribus, over all disciplines, U-shaped in the degree of competition (and, since I also believe that, overall, very high competition dominates very low competition equilibria, you already know what my prior of the ideal is). Remains however an open empirical question for now.

• We are what we ate: Tony Judt's culinary autobiography. Reminds me that (fortunately) I have only got to know top Indian restaurants in London (in general, Londonese Indian cuisine is probably, up to now, my favourite in the world; though surely there is a variance): a lot must have changed.

• Stanford also jumped in Google's bandwagon of online (dissertation) publishing.

• David Brooks on "the other education": concise and well written. I usually call this second education "exposure". The vast majority of people I've met hardly had any.

• Hyperopia... as a concern.

• Cheaptalk on the election process of Econometric Society Fellows. Not extremely surprising or, for that matter, singular within Economics; after all, they almost forgot Hurwicz for the Nobel Prize..., for largely the same reason: most of the people who used to propose and lobby for him died at some point... I think Ely is right: focus on the young people-- at least that would be an attempt to solve the problem for the future... And yes, for potential candidates why wouldn't you just look to the Econometrica editions (Lones Smith's suggestion in the comments)...

• Music critic review: mode d'emploi, by John Adams.

• Sex toy research. Or Ariely in the quest for another Nobel Ig :-). Goes without saying that I am extremely interested in the results.

• Philip Greenspun on universities and economic growth; via Razvan, on Ad Astra. First impression: he writes much and he misunderstands a lot; particularly the Economics of it all (no, he is not qualified to understand what is clear and what is controversial in Clark's book, to give but one example). Also, doesn't seem to realize (not sure whether qualifying this as voluntary misrepresentation would be better or worse...) the difference between statistical and anectodal evidence. And, in general, he doesn't seem to have decided whether his target is to make people incensed at or interested in what he has to say. BUT, although he errs nearly everywhere else, I agree that a. much change is needed in the way teaching in most universities is done nowadays (see also the 3rd bullet point here on opinions on the value of college education & all that jazz); b. he has some very decent ideas there (others had/have them too) and c. these changes would not cost too much, with the benefit very likely to outweigh that cost. (Probably) Inadvertently, Greenspun is actually arguing for a "Japanese approach" (which the Japanese apply to both teaching and on-the-job training): give a rather broad ("customer-based", if you want some context) training, be able to/ focus on study/work in teams, always help the new/junior ones etc. etc. There is however a known problem with the (standard) Japanese perspective to (life-long) education that I am not sure Greenspun is aware of... Simply put, you really do not want to give no/wrong incentives at the very top of the ability distribution.

• One of the two prediction markets on the 2009 Romanian Presidential Election is now closed and cashed-out (the other one is also "closed", but waiting for the final results on Dec 6th), as the official First Round results of that election are out. Several participants won (virtual) money (yours truly included), but the congratulations go to Dan, as he is the one who won the most (a fortune!). Which means that he is obviously going to pay for the (very good: e.g. the French on this list?) wine, with the occasion of our next meeting :-).

The new Danish ranking of journals

Ridiculous, if you ask me (needless to state, this is a very personal opinion). Unfortunately, in Economics (you find that category under "Samfundsøkonomi" in the linked pdf), there will be many years till Denmark will catch up with the best places in the Netherlands, for instance (see here an Economics journal ranking of the Tinbergen Institute (TI) , which has its imperfections-- such as Journal of Finance placed in the 'AA' category... -- but it is way way better), in competitiveness, attitude in this context etc. Not to mention the top places in US or UK (NB: the non-existence/ non-marketing of an explicit journal ranking on the (web)sites of those departments does not mean the non-existence of a very strict, informal hierarchy -- decisive in hiring and, especially, promotion decisions--, in many ways similar in spirit to the one of the TI linked above!).

The simple test the folks who made up this hierarchy (there was and still is a lot of disagreement among them apparently, this solution seems to be a compromise solution) should(have) subject(ed) themselves to is the following: if you are in the process of deciding where to submit the best paper you ever produced as yet, i.e. something you are satisfied with and very proud of, would you submit it to Econometrica, AER, JPE, QJE, ReStud, or to any of the other places (yes, some extremely good, much better than others paired with them..., but just somewhat below the very top category), which are placed in the same category in this ranking (if I were them, I would ask this question to any potential candidate I would consider hiring in my Danish Econ department). That first hierarchy level (labeled "2" in the pdf) can/should be further split in at least 3 sublevels (even the general editors of those journals in question would all agree; I doubt they were asked when this ranking was made up...). I won't even touch on assessing the fact that the rest of the journals were all bunched together in a second hierarchical level (labeled "1" in the document). This is not about my being obsessed with rankings, this is about having an idea about scientific quality. And about proper incentives.

PS. The hilarious thing is that some would like to add even more journals that nobody reads/cites to these two categories.

Weekend Econlinks

• Science Q&A with the female Nobelists this year.

• EMH: it really ain't dead. (via Mankiw)

• Harvard's financial report for 2009. And some of the (dire) consequences.

• Head hunting for a (younger than Mas-Colell...legal requirement, apparently) distinguished scientist to be the European Research Council's new Director.

• the NAJ Ain't a Journal of Economics. I can't understand why I find about it only now, this looks extremely interesting (via cheaptalk).

• High time for the Viking to break through! And a funny interview after the Nanjing show off. (via Susan Polgar)

• Levitt did pretty well on The Daily Show (he also did well on the Colbert Report a great while ago). Though I am rather puzzled by his statement "I am not a scientist"; I wonder whether he thinks that a. Economics is not a science, or else b. what he does is not Economics..., or else...?

• Landsburg is blogging. And he's got a couple of great posts already. Here's one of them, on Dawkins, and the origins of complexity.

• Cancer progress might be completely different than known so far.

• Polygamy preferred from any angle. Reminds me of Becker's arguments a while ago (2nd bullet point)-- by the way, they now made a book of the Becker-Posner blogposts.

• The death of the book as we knew it!/? And some nostalgia after book browsing.

Sunday econlinks

• An interesting debate in the latest issue of Capitalism and Society on the current status of Economics and other Social Sciences, worth reading especially for the two comments to the leading article on the theme. Unfortunately, Jon Elster, in his "Excessive Ambitions", otherwise a welcome (and relatively informed) outsider's critique, does not manage to rise up to his declared ambitions of debunking the status quo / portraying "the persistence in the economic profession and elsewhere of these useless or harmful models", and eventually falls easy prey to his commenters: Pierre-André Chiappori (who, very elegantly, but unmistakenly, tackles most of the points raised by Elster in his criticism of economic theory and testing its predictions) and respectively, David Hendry (who virtually destroys Elster's line of reasoning and conclusions on empirical modelling in Economics). To add up to that, beyond the many (surprising!) fallacies that Elster commits in his scientific criticism (not even half of them acknowledged, e.g. his sole reliance on third-party sources in the discussion of the criticism to the empirics is somewhat revealed, however the very selected sample of those sources --strategy common also to his earlier sections-- does not seem at all problematic to the author), what strikes me throughout his text is his often bringing up the lack of "humility" of economists (e.g., "The competence of economists may not be in question, but their humility is"), although in reading his piece I was rather intrigued by Elster's own absence of humility whatsoever in his strongly opinionated, though insufficiently argued, assessment... I was really hoping for something more serious.
• Solving the public-goods free rider problem using neuronal measures of economic value. Looks super interesting!
• "[D]oes conspicuous consumption fall and efficiency increase in a society in which income is conspicuous?" or some of the potentially positive implications (research-wise only...) of Norway's recent crazy move to make public all tax records of its (tax-paying) residents...
• Even Robert Parker can make a total mess of himself when it comes to wine blind tasting (via cheaptalk). And a short review of a new wine book by somebody who really doesn't like Parker (thanks to Fred for the link).
• "Wellicht komt er ooit een nieuw paradigma dat voor de economische wetenschap net zo revolutionair zal zijn als kwantummechanica is geweest voor de natuurkunde. Tot die tijd is het beter om te blijven schipperen met de kapstokken die we hebben in plaats van alles jassen op één grote hoop te gooien." door Wouter den Haan, op MeJudice
• An older interview with the foremost cafeteria Keynesian (Part 1, Part 2). I only agree with about 50% of what he's saying here... And I think some are just too fast in dismissing Milton Friedman, but... on verra.
• Norman Manea on Herta Muller's Literature Nobel. Though ultimately there isn't much in there about her Nobel..., which might actually be the whole idea of that post.
• Brinkmann, Ehrman and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Very interesting, all news to me.
• Is shouting the new spanking? Hopefully not.
• I generally agree, though, for instance, Econophysicists seem to have a hard time both on the Economics and on the Physics academic/ publishing market. Not that I wonder much why that is the case, but others may...
  

Econlinks

• Eric Maskin on the financial crisis (Mankiw, Cheaptalk and MR link to this interview, among others). Maskin is one of the smartest persons alive, so this is mandatory-- a must read in particular for those who'd like to crucify all economic theorists :-). I would also link however to a very interesting blogpost by Harald Uhlig, on VoxEU (a summary of his recent NBER working paper): he really extends the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) bank run model that Maskin starts with, such that it incorporates the stylized facts specific to the current financial crisis. Uhlig also makes very clear that this is just one way to view things and in fact that insolvency rather than illiquidity might have been the main culprit: "It is possible that the appropriate perspective is one of insolvency rather than illiquidity, and future research will hopefully sort this out."

• Of course Oliver Hart should have won this year's Nobel as well (and Bengt Holmstrom). I cannot but agree with Aghion here, as I made clear in my prediction for the Econ Nobel within the last 3 years... Returning to Elinor Ostrom, there are by now many reactions. Most of them seem to be as confused /skeptical as I was after the release of the results, e.g. Ely, Baliga, Levitt (I disagree with Levitt's "suspicion" that most young economists also did not hear about Williamson), to some extent even Cowen ("I was delighted to hear of Ostrom winning (which I had not expected) but frankly it makes the omission of Gordon Tullock all the more glaring" ) or Krugman ("I wasn’t familiar with Ostrom’s work"); nevertheless Economists who work /worked in public choice and related (the tragedy of the commons, in particular) seem delighted with the choice, e.g. Spence, Glaeser, Romer, Smith, Tabarrok, Gächter (the latter cited in this Science short article on the Econ Nobels). The conclusion of all this (once again) is that I really have to read Ostrom's main works sometime in the near future (meanwhile I also found out that apparently she's got at least one article in a mainstream Economics journal)-- and to accept that yes, to a great extent, we are all very ignorant.

• The professors who rock Harvard.

• Bucharest in 1961 . Plus photos from all UNESCO World Heritage sites in Romania (both via RomAlien)

• An analysis of journal submission strategies. I didn't have the time to follow in detail their analysis, but the conclusion is sensible:

"The journal submission process is a controversial and stressful part of academia. There are many dimensions of uncertainty, and bad decisions could greatly delay publication of important results and harm one's career. This paper provides new evidence that, on the whole, the advice supplied to young faculty members by veterans of academia is correct. Authors largely have an incentive to submit first to the best journals and then subsequently, wortk their way down a schedule of journals. The exceptions to this simple rule occur when authors are particularly impatient or risk-averse.

We also note, however, that the efficiency of the system may be improved by a system in which journals reduce time lags, perhaps through incentive-based rewards for faster reviewing by referees, and increase submission fees. This system reduces the impact of time-lags on impatient or risk averse authors and more efficiently rations submissions to journals- higher reward journals will get more submissions of high-quality papers and fewer submissions of low-quality papers. This also streamlines the publication process, shortening the time during which important results are sitting on a desk, waiting for publication. "

Econlinks

• A summary of the debate "What's wrong with macroeconomics?" The debate goes on.

• Terry Tao's presentation of Perelman's solution to Poincaré's conjecture. There are chances you still won't understand much, but this is way better than attempting to directly digest Perelman's original articles :-).

• Here's Paul Graham's rule of thumb for recognizing (publishing) winners and losers: "When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser" . He's also got an entertaining piece on the cheeseburger of essay forms.

• "So long as you use a knife there's some love left" or a(nother) glimpse at Norman Mailer's life & oeuvre. Controversy might be his nickname, but Mailer is one embarassing omission of the Literature Nobel Prize Commitee.

• The Chess Dreamteam?

• "The paradox is this: it's best to engage with your opponents' strongest arguments--but your view of what their strongest arguments are is not necessarily their view." This quote (valuable on its own) is from a must-read post of Gelman on (strategic) citation practices.

Weekend econlinks

• The other side of scientific publishing: the Editor's perspective. In this case nothing to complain about (au contraire: e.g., see earlier): if only most editors (cross-disciplinary) would follow on McAfee's steps... unfortunately, plenty of counterexamples around, such as the editors involved here

• Steven Shreve on working with models in the finance world. Shreve on a similar topic, earlier.

• Troubles in the adult entertainment industry...

• Econblogs doing great.

• One of the few things Romanians could/should copy from their Moldavian neighbours

• Bill Easterly reminding us about the gains from specialization.

• They might be having a slow, if any, economic recovery, but the Japanese are way ahead than anybody else technology-wise: Isaac Asimov would have loved this restaurant in Nagoya, Japan. Related, earlier.

• The hot waitress economic index.

• The Google Translate service: not a bad job (though things can be improved: e.g. "how are you, friend?" is translated in Danish "how are you, ven?" and in Hungarian "how are you, barátom?"; in most other languages I can check it seems to work fine :-)). See also a Google Research Blog recent article on the theme.


• The race to hire economists. Or statisticians. Or their combination?

• A new business hype (?): Investing in lawsuits.

Publishing Scientific Comments: The Pain, the Horror, the Frustration

This is absolutely amazing. I mean, of course it is absolutely awful for the researcher in question, but great that he took the pain to write it down: should be recommended reading for any (aspiring) scientist.

Via Andrew Gelman, who adds some of his own scietific 'commenting' sagas.

PS1. At step number 50 the journal editor involved here should have been guillotined without further delay, though I wouldn't be surprised if most of you will feel this ought to have been done even earlier in the story.

PS2. Applauses to Rick Trebino for keeping the ironic and funny tone throughout: most of us would have deeply failed at that, faced with such a situation.

Econlinks

• Always wise thoughts from the one and only Kevin Murphy . If for some reason you haven't heard of him yet, all you need to know is that Murphy holds comparative advantage in all forms of production.

• A quite old, but still interesting and revealing article on Sergey Brin. I like this bit from Eric Schmidt: "Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil".

• Ambition-adjusted (Economics) journal ranking. Some (my) highlights: 1. No matter how you measure it, top 5 is top 5 and has been virtually the same over many years (and, caveat lector, it is certainly not a top 6... or more; in particular maybe somebody from the Finance group(s) at my former Tinbergen Institute reads this and eliminates the Journal of Finance from their current top "5+1": I think it is the only place in the world where they have recently altered the very top by adding this extra field journal, though they would be happy to confirm that their best papers are submitted always to one of the other top 5's...); 2. JEcGrowth, Review of Econ Dynamics and JEEA are the very strong newcomers and they continue to go up the rankings; 3. EJ is a champion of self-citations; 4. Some formerly very prestigious journals recently lost quite some ground, examples being JHumResources, Journal of Credit, Money and Banking, JDynControl etc.

• I concur: this would be by far the best way to organize poster sessions. Particularly if they are in Economics or Social Sciences in general...

• An interesting NewYorker article on Iran's trial-and-error Economics policies.

• Italy outsourcing peer-review to NIH: it could potentially be a solution also for other countries where finding decent referees for grant proposals etc. has been notoriously difficult (think Romania and the like). Via Liviu Giosan, on Ad Astra.

• Sardines (and Sardinistas). Try them grilled with garlic and parsley, indeed!

• The imp of the perverse (or How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion)

• "The secret to The Economist’s success is not its brilliance, or its hauteur, or its typeface. The writing in Time and Newsweek may be every bit as smart, as assured, as the writing in The Economist. But neither one feels like the only magazine you need to read. You may like the new Time and Newsweek. But you must—or at least, brilliant marketing has convinced you that you must—subscribe to The Economist. " More about the Economics of The Economist.

(Many) Econlinks for the Weekend

• A nice, brief VoxEU note of Willem Buiter on negative nominal interest rates (and their potential desirability). Greg Mankiw also tackled the topic earlier.

• If you're at all into arithmetics (and not only) you might like this concise exposé on very big numbers (think Ackerman series, Busy Beavers and the like if you are dubious about what "very big" stands for in this context...). Inter alia, this reminds me that many many years ago :-), when I was starting highschool, one of my life goals was to prove the Goldbach conjecture. I guess meanwhile I started looking for easier life targets :-).

• We absolutely love Blonde Parades -- though I wouldn't necessarily ask a financial crisis as prerequisite :-).

• Harvard in BIG trouble?...

• Pacepa and the former Romanian car industry (that he does get at all WSJ editorial space I find rather amazing in the first place, that he uses it to give advice to the USA gov on the failed car companies is, well... just fantastic :-)...). Hmm, at least he's got an interesting "style", shifting the entire blame on his former superior(s)... There isn't much Economics in there of course, as he after all admits himself..., but I would have liked at least some more precision in the numbers (and no, "billions" in "The Oltcit project lost billions" is not what I would call a good approximation)

• This is the only bullet point connected to the "pathetic" label of this blogpost. Levitt oddly calls it "reasonably interesting" on Freakonomics (I also do not agree with all Levitt's further opinions on the apparent "macro problem", but well, I guess he is well versed in Macroeconomics to know it better :-)), but I find this Guardian editorial "interesting" only inasmuch it shows the difference in Economics education between the "Economics editor" (sic!) of The Guardian and other Economics editors at, say, WSJ, NYTimes, The Economist, or FT... Inter alia, I wouldn't pretend that everybody understands the work of Bonhomme and Robin forthcoming at the ReStud (or for that matter, any other work in a top 5 research journal within Economics, which perhaps is not aimed to really everybody?), but indeed from an "Economics editor" we would perhaps expect a little bit more that the appraisal "divorced from reality" (merely from reading the abstract and nothing further in the text, since else our author would have found plenty of "reality"...). But Economics à la The Guardian it is, now you know what to read :-).

• Who's a bigger villain for Development: Mugabe or Anopheles/ Sachs or Easterly...? I guess you ought to know by now what I think in this mater, but that should not stop you from making your own opinion :-).

• In a rather vague Reuters article Romania comes 3rd in a top of "new wine regions". A pity they do not mention any Romanian wine de facto in that top, since the variance in the quality of all wines produced in the above mentioned regions is... well, infinite.

• Interesting facts & thoughts by Dan Hamermesh on (incentive...) bonuses for papers with multiple co-authors. Should they be designed as function of 1/N or 1/SquareRoot(N), where N the number of co-authors etc.? Perhaps we should also know what other disciplines do, if anything, in this regard, in Economics indeed there seems to be a (very surprising) heterogeneity of such practices among various Departments/Institutes.

• It might be the first time ever..., but yes, the Historian won against the Economist (my good old friend Daniel, Harvard trained Historian of Science too, will surely be very pleased to hear this:-) ). I would never allow Paul Krugman in such competitions again, this is bad for the whole Econ field :-). The good thing though is that the Historian won with (the true) Economics arguments :-).

• Average citation rates by field (through Ad Astra). One trend not emphasized in the article's discussion following the table is that in some fields the citation impact is very low on the short run (1-3 years), but increases much faster over the the longer run (8-10 years). This is why for instance Economics gets a higher average citation impact than Mathematics or Computer Science overall, though in the short run (eg, the two years span that the Thomson ISI citation ranks are typically constructed on) is equally "de-cited". Consider switching to Molecular Biology if you're after citations :-).

Sunday night econlinks

• Reviewing the reviewers, with cross-disciplinary insights. Who would have thought that Economics is somewhat like History? :-). Thanks to Daniel for the link!

• The Prisoner's Dilemma in practice or 'Who's got the Golden Balls'? :-). Greg Mankiw already decided to use it for his econ classes :-).

• The Economic Journal announces two interesting changes in terms of its submission/refereeing process, aiming at speeding up and raising the bar in the peer review process: i) Referees will not be individually paid anylonger, but the 10 best referees every year will each get a 500 pound prize. ii) In terms of submission process, submission of editorial letters and previous referee reports at other journals is encouraged. Read the whole letter. I think that whether i) works in speeding and improving the refereeing process is really an empirical quest, but ii) should be clearly adopted formally also by other journals.

• Definitely a necessary debate within the structural vs. reduced-model economics context. I think/hope that this was just the warming up stage :-). Some extremely interesting contributions so far, all from top names in the Econ field: i) Marschak's Maxim nowadays; ii) Instruments of Development; iii) Better LATE than nothing. Not entirely on the same frequence, but somewhat of a prelude--third bullet point and earlier links therein.

• Bill Easterly's secret to succesful aid.

• We know quite a bit about the bad ones by now, e.g. from everyday's news... So time to hear more about the good pirates. (There should be of course no question about the best pirates ).

Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis

It exists!

Beyond the fact that I think this is the best journal name I have ever heard of, I do agree however with the other points of Andrew Gelman . But it would be fun to have something published in there. I might just have something for them, depending on the number of rejections in journals which do not support the null hypothesis :-).

PS. The comments to Gelman's post above mention also other very interesting journals. My favourites: Journal of Interesting Negative Results and Rejecta Mathematica.

A morning thought on peer-review

Good journals in Economics (say top 15) typically have good referees (though it also depends on who the Editor in that particular case is and especially on how much effort he is putting in picking the referees; sometimes you have the feeling they expressly choose folks who really seem to have no expertise whatsoever in your area).

The serious problem starts as soon as you go somewhat downwards in the journal rankings (why would you do ever do that? well, for instance because you yourself would feel like rejecting that particular paper of yours at higher ranked journals...): the quality of the referees decreases more than ten fold for each position in the journal hierarchy (abstract for a moment from the fact that not everybody agrees with the existent hierarchies, though most serious people agree to the 10 or so top journals). I am not sure whether this is due to good people always refusing to referee for those lower-ranked journals or to the Editor choosing lower quality referees to start with (which could be surely linked to the former reason). Of course this sort of discussion is not new (see also a previous post where I linked to interesting perspectives on this), it is just frustrating when you experience it yourself...

What to do? Write only papers that can make it in top 5... and hope you do not get very stubborn Editors and referees there, which is a less desired side-effect... After all you do want your, not somebody else's, paper published. All in all, you do not have any chance of getting bored in this research-and-publish business :-).

Econlinks (old and new)

• To blurb or not to blurb, this is the new question...

• Pigovian taxation on everybody's understanding, by Greg Mankiw

• Denmark at the frontier once again (with Tyler Cowen spotting it very fast): free gym membership as long as you show up every time...

• Beer or wine and science (this is really fun, by the way and perhaps expected? :-)). I guess they don't separate serious drinkers of Belgian beer from the rest of beer drinkers, though, so that my friends still stand a chance :-).

• Jim Heckman on early interventions and importance of early child environment (his Marshall keynote lecture at the EEA-ESEM in Milano about a month ago was linked to this and much more detailed, by the way-- in my opinion the best keynote at the EEA-ESEM this year).

• Necessarily on the mother of all bailouts proposal-- Zingales with the best perspective so far. More bailout: most serious US Economists united against it. One prominent economist did not sign this, however, and sees it justified (in a way),

Econlinks this week

• Interesting article (via Tyler Cowen, on MR) on the economics of the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn, by C. Bohanon (written a while ago). The recent obituary for him in The Economist seems to openly ignore some of the conclusions emerging from Bohanon's analysis...

• Learn how to manage your (research) time, from Terry Tao. Not only for Maths nerds!

• Increasing motorcyclists' death rate in USA. What happened to that proposal making them sign to become organ donors if they do not wear helmets...?

• The death of the Renaissance man: "If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity - a greater reliance on teamwork - and negative implications for growth." This is from a super interesting, forthcoming ReStud paper, by Benjamin Jones.

• an older NYTimes article on The Economics of an Eye for an Eye. Interesting, though I think they mix a lot of sources in the NYTimes article, not all of the same degree of credibility. Generalization is quite cumbersome... By the way, I think the Romanians' willingness to punish (cited in the newspaper article) is hump-shaped on the gravity of the crime... But that being said, I still haven't had time to read Naci Mocan's original NBER article on the topic, that might be much clearer.

• Ex post on Einstein and the peer review system (via Gabi Istrate on Ad Astra). I realize this detail somehow escaped Isaacson's careful analysis; otherwise his recent book on Einstein is absolutely great, I warmly recommend it to everybody-- and will say more about this book, once I will have read also its last two chapters.

Econlinks for the weekend

• This erotic-stimuli-influencing-spending might be more serious than I thought (see my earlier short comment to Tyler Cowen's erotics of investing- 2nd bullet point). Although the researchers admit that all their conclusions rely on the men faced with a decision to be taken in a second or so... Yeah, then it could be very true :-). Some idea for smart business managers?...

• How to read a CV when the subject (considered for academic tenure) has about two top papers, but the second sort of refutes the first: interesting thoughts from Cowen on MR. Talking about that, here's somebody famous in that situation; Levitt likes her too (so better refute then remain silent...). And if you passed that tenure-track stage, here are some benefits of being a full professor. Not that in Economics anybody thinks it's a drama if you actually leave your department... or your profession altogether. Though, if you did stay for quite a while, you might want more incentives to publish high?...

• The new Dutch Me Judice partnering with VoxEu. Geen slecht idee, hoor!

• Investigating the root of biases and stereotypes (this is beyond scratching the surface and shifting all debate on political correctness: yes/no, as too often done nowadays). So far this is really not modelled thoroughly within Economics and much of this review of research within psychology is super interesting (though it is very mixed...). Here's an interesting quote, just to give you an idea what this is about: "To what degree are our decisions swayed by implicit social biases? How do those implicit biases interact with our more deliberate choices? A growing body of work indicates that implicit attitudes do, in fact, contaminate our behavior. Reflexive actions and snap judgments may be especially vulnerable to implicit associations." Link also to the 1st bullet point above.

• The new business gurus: I agree with Gardner and Hamel in top 5, but Thomas Friedman should be a very passing fad...

Econlinks today

• Esther Duflo on a topic that deserves much more attention among policy makers: the need to insure the very poor against food price variability

• Here's the most ridiculous thing I've heard so far, within the academic publishing business: deliberately slowing things down by sitting a whole month on each submission before doing anything with it. Via Andrew Gelman. Something like this might well be practiced by more journals and in many fields ( and surely I am thinking mostly about my own field here...) than currently known: could explain a substantial part of (complementing the fact that referees are not easy to find and they might be slow themselves, see also here) the often exaggerated times before one gets back referee reports etc. I think it just shows the incapacity of those editors to function as editors, if that is the case. And obviously excessive crowding/queueing can be solved in this context, similar to many other contexts involving congestion, by raising submission fees (despite the apparent objection of some people, which Gelman also mentions, that people don't have the money for it-- give me a break, I'd say: if you are indeed such an underpaid academic, probably you can't produce the quality required for that top journal anyway; and for universities in places that really run low on budgets and remuneration in general, like Africa, Eastern Europe etc., some reduction or waiver could be in place).

• "Econometrics: qu'est-ce que c'est?" or econometrics as taught at University of Michigan (where also other Econ professors seem to be very talented inasmuch as music is concerned) :-). I think many economics/ econometrics professors elsewhere could learn something from this-- it isn't for nothing that most students consider econometrics courses the most boring courses they (have to) take... Here's the academic website of the excellent performer above, in case anyone wants to contact him for advice in teaching.

• Discussion on the merits of (further/ re-) regulating financial markets: Becker and respectively, Posner. I believe Posner is for some reason becoming too skeptical of the powers of the free market, so I'll strongly recommend only Becker's analysis this time :-).

• Collected advice for young economists (via Tyler Cowen on MR), from senior economists. I have read all of these pieces before (though, unfortunately, haven't always followed the advice in there...), but it is excellent to have them in one place.