TY  - JOUR
AU  - Smart,Scott
AU  - Waldfogel,Joel
TI  - A Citation-Based Test for Discrimination at Economics and Finance       Journals
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5460
PY  - 1996
Y2  - February 1996
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5460
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5460.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Joel Waldfogel
Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics
3-177 Carlson School of Management
University of Minnesota
321 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Tel: 612/626-7128
E-Mail: jwaldfog@umn.edu
AB  - Discrimination is notoriously difficult to document.  Convincing tests for discrimination require good measures of the legitimate determinants of the outcome of interest, for example wages and productivity.  While few contexts provide data adequate to the task of measuring discrimination, copious bibliographic data on the impact of academic research make possible tests of discrimination in the editorial process.  This study develops a test for possible bias þ with respect to author gender, prestige of author's institution, article content (theory vs. empiricism), and whether the author has ties to the editor þ using a new approach based on an analysis of citations.  We treat citations as a measure of article quality and ask whether papers by certain groups receive systematically different numbers of citations.  The key to our approach is the observation that editors do not simply accept or reject papers.  For accepted papers, editors determine articles' order within journal issue and length based on their quality assessments.  We show that these 'editorial treatment' decisions are highly correlated with citations.  Thus, we infer bias against a particular group of authors if their published articles have more citations, conditional editorial treatment, than other articles.  Surprisingly, we document systematic editorial bias in favor of authors located outside of top institutions.
ER  -