How much would you pay for publication at the AER?

From the EJMR: 
"I have a new paper that I consider my best work. For a variety of reasons, the marginal return professionally for this paper is very small for me. But I think it has an excellent shot a top journal, I would estimate 1/3 at the AER (I have published there before). So I am offering it for sale. Here are the details: 
1. This paper is not yet posted on my website. It has not been circulated and I have not yet presented it. 
2. The paper is applied micro although I will sell it to anyone. 
3. Email bids to econpubforsale@hotmail.com. Use a fake account and make sure to send no revealing information. 
4. Your bid is for an AER or QJE. If it ends in Restud, you pay 65%. If it ends in the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, or EJ, you pay 35%. Other journals are negotiable. You can choose the submission path as long as it starts with one of the top journals. 
5. I will contact the winning bid (or highest real bid) to arrange an in person meeting in Philly at the meetings. We will never leave a paper trail.
6. Half of payment is due with a revise and resubmit. I will also make the needed changes. The final half is due with final acceptance. 
7. Spare me any discussion of the ethics here. I am dead serious and I will not be commenting further on this thread."
Is this a troll, an experiment or is it for real? This was the focus of the discussion behind the quoted thread on the EJMR page (btw I recommend this page to my readers - check it out, it a forum that has info on the econ job market, conferences, journal submission timing etc.). Alex Tabarrok estimates a price of $50,000 for publishing at a top journal like AER or QJE, particularly for someone who's a new PhD graduate and wants to move up the academic ladder quickly. I would say, seriously overpriced! And definitely not worth the risk. 

The ethical ramifications are useless to discuss, as the author suggests. Intellectual property is a good like any other and can be bought and sold at the owner's will. But the real question is how big of a market are we talking about? Is the demand for top-tier papers really that big? At first glance one would say definitely; academics need it for their careers (some people were commenting they were only a few top-journal papers away from tenure at their Universities), and after all who wouldn't want their work being published at the American Economic Review or Quarterly Journal of Economics? For those unaware, these are the top journals in economics in the world, alongside Econometrica and Journal of Political Economy - on various rankings these always come on top (see here, here or here). However, if you think more thoroughly the question is how would one get away with this? I mean, to publish a random (brilliant) paper that has nothing to do with the research you did so far in your career, and even more, to try and use it for tenure? I don't think this would quite qualify. One would easily get caught, meaning that your net return would be significantly negative (you paid money AND you lost your academic credibility). Even if you're at the beginning of your academic career it would be rather suspicious if you all of a sudden produce a top-tier paper in a subject you did noting on before. People will be able to see your PhD topic, after all. So this pretty much narrows it down to those who did research on applied micro. But then the question is, what kind of research? Applied micro is a very broad category and is rather vague. I can think of a lot of issues that can be classified as applied micro. The probability that the paper for sale corresponds to the field of research one of the people who saw this "ad" did is actually really small (I can calculate it but I'd have to use too many assumptions - e.g. that every economist who published a topic in applied micro has seen it, then I'd have to narrow down the definition of applied micro, and so on). This also means that the market for this paper is very, very small.

Anyway, I suggest someone pays close attention to applied micro papers published at the AER or QJE in the next year or so. Perhaps this was the initial incentive of the seller? To foster greater scrutiny on the papers that get published in these journals. Maybe, maybe not. We may never know...

Comments

  1. Charlie10 June 2013 at 13:18

    this is a troll, it has to be..no one has "small returns" on an AER paper publication

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short-selling explained (case study: movie "Trading Places")

Image
After seeing the movie "Trading Places" (1983), starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, for the thousandth time during the holiday season, I decided to write a quick post explaining what happened at the end of this movie that gets so many people puzzled (including me for the first couple of times I've seen it). This entertaining 80s comedy can actually teach you more about finance and trading than any other Hollywood movie (not counting documentaries), including the infamous "Wall Street" (1987), starring Michael Douglas as the ruthless Gordon Gecko, and especially the latest Scorsese film "The Wolf of Wall Street" (2013). Anyway, we all know the story from Trading Places. Dan Aykroyd plays a snobbish investor Louis Winthorpe ("the Third"), while Eddie Murphy plays a street con artist Billy Ray Valentine whose lives get reversed as a result of a bet between two cruel millionaires, the Duke brothers. The Dukes own a commodities bro
Read more

Economic history: mercantilism and international trade

Image
All too often during poor economic times many debunked economic fallacies of the past get reinvented. The reason is simple: a search for ideas and solutions alternative to the "mainstream" (however we define it) allows those who succumb to these fallacies to repeat the ancient errors classical economics was hoping to get rid of. The short-termism of politics plays a crucial role in the process of persistent perpetuation of such fallacies. This is why in times like these it is essential to go back in economic history and debunk some of the ideas that tend to surface repeatedly. In the following couple of posts, I attempt to do just that.  Misunderstanding trade  One of the most misunderstood areas of economics is international trade. More precisely, the idea that if we were to boost net exports - by subsidizing exports and constraining imports - we can achieve higher GDP growth. If one looks at the simple arithmetic of a standard Keynesian macro model: Y=C+I+G+NX, the
Read more

Rent-seeking explained: Removing barriers to entry in the taxi market

Image
The taxi market is undoubtedly one of the best examples of something economists like to call rent-seeking . What does this phenomenon stand for and why do economists (particularly political economists) devote a lot of attention to it?  The classical definition was given by Gordon Tullock back in his  1967  seminal paper "The welfare cost of tariffs, monopolies and theft" , even though the phrase itself was coined by Anne Krueger in 1974 .  Rent-seeking is a process of gaining private benefits through the political process (by lobbying or logrolling for example). It implies gaining protection for a certain privileged group, which in return promises political support, large campaign contributions, or even bribes. This protection varies from giving a monopoly status to a certain company, regulating market entry than hampers competition (such as introducing licences to specific occupations), imposing tariffs to import goods to protect the domestic industry, handing out su
Read more

Graphs (images) of the week: Separated by a border

Image
Usually comparing countries or regions requires looking at GDP growth data, GDP per capita, living standards, relative income or even the happiness index. But even a simple areal glimpse at the borders separating two systems can be more than enough to conclude which country is richer, healthier, more educated and on average more prosperous. It tells us that the causes of between-country differences have to be more than just climate, geography, culture or mentality. Particularly when the same nation is separated by nothing more than a border depicting the striking differences in political systems of the two countries (a classical example here are East and West Germany, but an equally good example can be North or South Korea).  As a result I found that the following set of images paint a better  picture  on between-country differences   than any existing data on global inequality.  The first one is from a  blog post I encountered on the Why Nations Fail blog, comparing the citi
Read more