On Friday, April 3rd, Professor Sergey Popov from the Queen's University Belfast visited ISET to present his paper titled "On Publication, Refereeing, and Working Hard” co-authored with Sascha Baghestanian, junior professor at the department for management and applied microeconomics at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany.

Mr. Popov started his talk by providing some real-life examples – when authors got rejected from journals or vice versa. He explained that the publication process in Economics has changed significantly in the last decades. New journals emerged, both general and field-specific.

More authors submit their papers for publication, respectively, causing the acceptance rates to go down considerably. Submitted manuscripts increased in length, the number of authors per paper rose, and more time is spent on revising before acceptance.

In the paper, the authors discussed a model for academia with heterogeneous author types and endogenous efforts to evaluate recent changes in the publication process in Economics. They analyzed the implications of these developments on research output. Lowering the precision of refereeing signals lowers effort choices of golden middle authors, but invites more submissions from less able authors. Increasing the number of journals stimulates less able authors to submit their papers. The editor can improve the journal’s quality pool of submitted manuscripts by improving the precision of refereeing, but not by lowering acceptance standards. The submission strategy of an author is informative of his ability.

ISET would like to thank Sergey Popov for presenting a very interesting, informative, and useful seminar to the ISET community.