Systematic Bias in the Progress of Finance Research

We analyze whether citing practices in finance are driven by scientific merit or whether they are systematically biased due to strategic considerations. The discontinuation of the Journal of Business (JB) in 2006 for extraneous reasons serves as the exogenous shock for analyzing strategic citing behavior. Using difference-in-differences analysis, we find that articles published in JB before 2006 experienced a relative reduction of approximately 16% in citations after 2006. Since the discontinuation of JB is unrelated to the articles' scientific contribution, the results imply that the referencing of articles in finance is systematically affected by strategic considerations, which hinders scientific progress