Post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Finance, Laszlo Sandor has contributed an essay to a new eBook, titled ‘Publishing and Measuring Success in Economics’, published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research Press.
The ebook by Sebastian Galiani, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, and Ugo Panizza, Vice-President of CEPR and Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, “examines concerns surrounding publishing in the economics profession with a series of short essays focusing on how economists publish their research and measure academic success” (www.cepr.org). Gallani and Panizza aimed to find ways to tackle gender and racial biases in the field of research and create a fairer and more efficient publication process.
In their essay, Dr. Sandor and co-authors Raj Chetty (Harvard University) and Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) discuss the results of a natural field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. The authors concluded that that a combination of sorter deadlines, cash incentives, and social incentives could play an important role in improving the refereeing process. One of the most interesting results of the study, however, was the finding that referees who received cash incentives to act quicker kept up the pace even when the incentive was removed. This goes against the common thinking that incentives can cancel out intrinsic motivations.
The complete eBook is available for download here.