We derive expressions for the first-order bias of the MLE for a Poisson regression model and show how these can be used to adjust the estimator and reduce bias without increasing MSE. The analytic results are supported by Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application.

We consider the relationship between the rankings and the title length of 159 academic economics journals. Although there is no significant association between these two metrics for the full sample of data, we find that a significant “bathtub” relationship between journal quality and title...