[Copyright American Economics Association; reproduced with permission of the AEA]
James Heckman
1. "If people are really aiming to go just into the top 5 journals and their goal is to publish papers as opposed to contribute to basic knowledge, I think that's a limited vision of economics and what economic research should be."
George Akerlof
2. "There's a whole type of economics that economists simply don't do that doesn't occur in our journals. For examples economists did not provide detailed reportage of what was happening in the financial system [in 2005]."
Angus Deaton
3. "When somebody tells me, 'We'll that's your favorite candidate for bringing here, but we don't like their work at all' and you can try to explain but often you get nowhere at all because there isn't a common ground for communicating that information... That's why these algorithms, and this very silly algorithm (top 5) has become very popular."
Drew Fudenberg
4. "We're not alone in this, we didn't just for some bizarre reason switch to a bad equilibrium. For some reason parallel things are happening in other fields."
Lars Peter Hansen
5. "This reliance on referees leads to a much more conservative strategy. I think it works against novel papers that cross subfield boundaries and that makes it all the more challenging. Basically it makes the simplest path to publication in the top 5 journals to be high quality follow up papers."
(original version posted March 2017)
