nep-sog New Economics Papers
on Sociology of Economics
Issue of 2021‒01‒18
five papers chosen by
Jonas Holmström
Axventure AB

  1. Academic in-group bias in economics By Lutmar, Carmela; Reingewertz, Yaniv
  2. Explaining Academic Performance of First–Year Undergraduate Students in Economics By A. Abdulhakeem, Kilishi
  3. Academic Careers and Fertility Decisions By Maria De Paola; Roberto Nisticò; Vincenzo Scoppa
  4. Does double-blind peer-review reduce bias? Evidence from a top computer science conference By Mengyi Sun; Jainabou Barry Danfa; Misha Teplitskiy
  5. The rise of research on development economics in Vietnam: Analyses and implications for the public and policymakers from SSHPA 2008-2020 dataset By , AISDL

  1. By: Lutmar, Carmela; Reingewertz, Yaniv
    Abstract: This paper studies academic in-group bias in the top five economics journals. We examine citation counts for articles published in these journals during the years 2006–2015, and compare counts for articles written by in-group members versus out-group members, where in-group status is defined based on whether at least one author shares the journal’s institutional affiliation. Our results suggest that in-group bias exists in the QJE, but not in the JPE or REStud (the AER and Econometrica are the control group). We thus confirm the existence of academic in-group bias in some, but not all, top five economics journals.
    Keywords: Academic in-group bias, top five, economics journals, editorial favoritism
    JEL: A14 I23 O34
    Date: 2020–12–14
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:104730&r=all
  2. By: A. Abdulhakeem, Kilishi (University of Ilorin)
    Abstract: This paper examines the impact of a set of academic performance predictors on first-year undergraduate students of Economics. The academic performance predictors are grouped into preuniversity school characteristics, prior academic achievement, entrance requirements, university and social factors. Stepwise regression technique was employed in the analysis. The results show that performance in O’level Economics and University and Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) consistently have significant positive influence on students’ academic performance. Attendance of tutorial in the university has important influence students’ performance. It is evident that male academic performance is on the average, lower than female performance. However, there is weak evidence that time students spend on social media negatively affect their academic performance. This paper therefore, recommends that admission authority should put more emphasis on O’level grade in Economics and UTME score when considering candidates to study economics; and that tutorial should be well organized by the Department rather than arbitrarily as being organized currently.
    JEL: A21 A22 I21 I23
    Date: 2021–01–09
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:decilo:0009&r=all
  3. By: Maria De Paola (Università della Calabria and IZA); Roberto Nisticò (Università di Napoli Federico II, CSEF and IZA); Vincenzo Scoppa (University of Calabria and IZA)
    Abstract: We investigate how academic promotions affect the propensity of women to have a child. We use administrative data on the universe of female assistant professors employed in Italian universities from 2001 to 2018. We estimate a model with individual fixed effects and find that promotion to associate professor increases the probability of having a child by 0.6 percentage points, which translates into an increase by 12.5% of the mean. This result is robust to employing a Regression Discontinuity Design in which we exploit the eligibility requirements in terms of research productivity introduced since 2012 by the Italian National Scientific Qualification (NSQ) as an instrument for qualification (and therefore promotion) to associate professor. Our finding provides important policy implications in that reducing uncertainty on career prospects may lead to an increase in fertility.
    Keywords: Fertility, Promotion, Academic Career, Career uncertainty.
    JEL: J13 J65 J41 M51 C31
    Date: 2021–01–14
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:595&r=all
  4. By: Mengyi Sun; Jainabou Barry Danfa; Misha Teplitskiy
    Abstract: Peer review is widely regarded as essential for advancing scientific research. However, reviewers may be biased by authors' prestige or other characteristics. Double-blind peer review, in which the authors' identities are masked from the reviewers, has been proposed as a way to reduce reviewer bias. Although intuitive, evidence for the effectiveness of double-blind peer review in reducing bias is limited and mixed. Here, we examine the effects of double-blind peer review on prestige bias by analyzing the peer review files of 5027 papers submitted to the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a top computer science conference that changed its reviewing policy from single-blind peer review to double-blind peer review in 2018. We find that after switching to double-blind review, the scores given to the most prestigious authors significantly decreased. However, because many of these papers were above the threshold for acceptance, the change did not affect paper acceptance decisions significantly. Nevertheless, we show that double-blind peer review may have improved the quality of the selections by limiting other (non-author-prestige) biases. Specifically, papers rejected in the single-blind format are cited more than those rejected under the double-blind format, suggesting that double-blind review better identifies poorer quality papers. Interestingly, an apparently unrelated change - the change of rating scale from 10 to 4 points - likely reduced prestige bias significantly, to an extent that affected papers' acceptance. These results provide some support for the effectiveness of double-blind review in reducing prestige bias, while opening new research directions on the impact of peer review formats.
    Date: 2021–01
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2101.02701&r=all
  5. By: , AISDL
    Abstract: Over three decades of economic reform since 1986, Vietnam has gone from one of the poorest in the world to a lower-middle-income country. To bring the economy to the next level, science and technology development has been viewed as one of the major instruments with various new policies being introduced since 2008. Consequently, scientific publications have become an important intellectual resource. The field of development economic research also benefits from the focus on science and technology. Yet, little is known about the overall research landscape of the field. This thesis, hence, aims to fill this knowledge gap by studying a bibliometric dataset of development economic research in Vietnam from 2008 to 2020, which was extracted from The Social Sciences and Humanities Peer Awards (SSHPA) database. Descriptive and Bayesian statistics were used for analysis. We observed a steady growth of scientific publications over the years. Quantitative studies dominate the field, probably because of the availability of secondary data. The number of authors increased significantly, but the productivity is highly skewed toward the top 5% authors, who contributed 50.61% of total publications. Collaboration pattern witnessed a significant change: less dependence on foreign colleagues and the emergence of domestic research groups. The list of journals and publishers where Vietnamese authors published the most shows high quality and reputation. Although traditional paywalled publishing is common, the result suggests that open access (OA) is being adopted widely. In fact, OA articles tend to get more citations. Meanwhile, the citation is negatively associated with female authors and the number of Vietnamese authors. Finally, the number of foreigners in an article, and the participation of female authors tend to increase the quartile of the article.
    Date: 2020–12–14
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:osfxxx:9nbyr&r=all

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