Must-Read: Roger Farmer: How to Fix the Curse of the Five

Must-Read: Roger Farmer: How to Fix the Curse of the Five: “I recently came across this video link to a session held at the 2017 ASSA meetings on the ‘Curse of the Top Five’…

…Jim Heckman… George Akerlof, Angus Deaton, Drew Fudenberg and Lars Hansen. I’m going to concentrate here on… Heckman and Akerlof. Heckman made several points…. The top five journals… influence… is increasingly important in promotion and tenure decisions… concentrates power in the hands of a small group of insiders and that makes it much harder for new ideas to emerge….

A friend of mine… related the following story…. A junior colleague…. In a departmental discussion, the point was made that hir tenure decision would be contingent on whether the paper was accepted there. As my friend remarked; why would we delegate our tenure decision to the editor of the AER?

George Akerlof has five recommendations…. Editors should take more responsibility… referees are advisors rather than… rewrit[ers]… diminish the role of top-five publications in tenure decisions… ‘shame’ deans who act as top-five bean counters…. broaden the scope of areas that we deem to be intellectually acceptable….

I have two recommendations of my ownn…. More than five journals be given equal weight… junior faculty… should be judged on their best three articles…. When I first moved to UCLA in the late 1980s, the senior faculty would read the work of our junior colleagues…