Lecture by Prof. Ascensión Andina Díaz, Universidad de Málaga, at the BERG Research Seminar on the 9th of December

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Ascensión Andina Díaz, Universidad de Málaga, will give a lecture within the BERG-Research Seminar on the topic of

“Rejected: Career concerns in the refereeing process”

The date is Tuesday, 9th of December, 3 p.m., in room FG1/00.08.

We analyze the effect of career concerns on the refereeing process. We consider a journal editor and two referees who may differ in reputation and ability. A referee’s reputation is public information,
while a referee’s ability is private information. We identify an incentive for low-ability referees to reject good papers —a phenomenon we call over-rejection— and find that this incentive increases with the referee’s reputation. We show that over-rejection decreases with competition, referee homogeneity, and the anonymity of the refereeing process. In contrast to low-ability experts, high-ability referees are sincere in equilibrium. Since a referee with a higher reputation is ex-ante more likely to be high-ability, our results suggest that the probability of rejection is inverted U-shaped in the referee’s reputation. We empirically test this result. We use data from Card and DellaVigna (2020) for submissions to four top economic journals in the period 2003-2013 and use the referee’s publication record as a proxy for the referee’s reputation. We find that the probability of sending a negative recommendation increases with the referee’s reputation for referees with a lower publication record and decreases thereafter, suggesting an inverted U-shaped form in line with our theoretical results.