How can workers have a voice in the face of declining unionization and rising nontraditional career paths? To demonstrate how a new labor market institution can emerge, I develop a model of fundraising by a workers' organization in which the founder must allocate resources between the provision...

We study a novel dataset compiled from archival records, which includes information on men's wages, union status, educational attainment, work history, and other background variables for several cities circa 1950. Such data are extremely rare for the early post-war period when U.S. unions were...

Economists are obsessed with rankings of institutions, journals, or scholars according to the value of some feature of interest. These rankings are invariably computed using estimates rather than the true values of such features. As a result, there may be considerable uncertainty concerning the...

Using Fontana et al.'s (2019) database, we analyze levels and trends in the global distribution of authorship in economics journals, disaggregating by country/region, quality of journal, and fields of specialization. We document striking imbalances. While Western and Northern European authors...

The network of economists who publish in leading journals is generally perceived as small, exclusive, and tightly knit. We study how author-editor and author-reviewer network connectivity and "match" influences editor decisions and reviewer recommendations of economic research at the Journal of...

Forecasts of experimental results can clarify the interpretation of research results, mitigate publication bias, and improve experimental designs. We collect forecasts of the results of three Registered Reports preliminarily accepted to the Journal of Development Economics, randomly varying four...

We study the role of gender in the evaluation of economic research using submissions to four leading journals. We find that referee gender has no effect on the relative assessment of female- versus male-authored papers, suggesting that any differential biases of male referees are negligible. To...

This paper examines the relationship between placement of publications in Top Five (T5) journals and receipt of tenure in academic economics departments. Analyzing the job histories of tenure-track economists hired by the top 35 U.S. economics departments, we find that T5 publications have a...

We study how citation patterns differ between journal tiers in economics. Concretely, we analyze citations patterns of more than 6,000 economics research articles published in top five, second tier, and top field economics journals between 1992 and 1996. In line with previous literature, we find...

Our previous paper (McCabe and Snyder 2014) contained the provocative result that, despite a positive average effect, open access reduces cites to some articles, in particular those published in lower-tier journals. We propose a model in which open access leads more readers to acquire the full...