Concentration of power at the editorial boards of economics journals

State Research Agency (Spain), Grant/Award Number: Project PID2019-111708GA-I00 financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033Using a unique dataset covering 106 economics journals over the period 1990–2011, we document trends in the incidence of multiple positions, editorial duration and institutional background for 6192 board members. We put these figures into perspective using the literature on boards of directors and measures of market concentration. The picture that emerges is of a discipline with a high concentration of institutional and individual power, especially at the more prestigious journals. Evidence suggests this indeed matters: there is a strong negative association between editorial duration and journal impact.State Research Agency (Spain) PID2019-111708GA-I00 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103

When a coauthor joins an editorial board

Using novel and large-scale data at the individual level, we find that when a coauthor joins an editorial board of an economics journal an author publishes more articles in the “coauthor’s”journal. This increase is larger, the less experienced the author is, and the more editorial power the coauthor obtains. It disappears quickly once the coauthor leaves the journal’s board. A less experienced author whose coauthor joins an editorial board also publishes more in journals different from the coauthor’s journal. We find that the connections-as-signals hypothesis and the identity-independent information hypoth- esis explain more patterns in the data than the other hypotheses we consider. Only the favoritism hypothesis can explain that, at journals with low board turnover, articles pub- lished during a coauthor’s stint on the editorial board receive less citations than articles published during other years. This finding suggests that editors and publishers can address a cause of favoritism by stimulating editorial rotation.Massey UniversityMiddlesex UniversityEC Research Innovation Action under the H2020 Programme INFRAIA-2016-1-730897State Research Agency (Spain) PID2019-111708GA-I0 0/SRAUniversidad de Granada/CBU

Fluctuations in global macro volatility

Este trabajo se basa en un enfoque de factores de volatilidad para estimar y descomponer segundos momentos, cambiantes en el tiempo, del crecimiento del PIB a través de países en contribuciones globales, regionales e idiosincrásicas. Los resultados documentan una moderación global de los ciclos económicos internacionales, definida como una disminución persistente de la volatilidad macroeconómica en las principales economías del mundo. Esta disminución de la volatilidad ha sido inducida por una reducción del componente subyacente global, y desvela un nuevo nivel de interconexión de la economía mundial. Después de evaluar la importancia de diferentes factores económicos, se encuentra que la reducción de la volatilidad macroeconómica de los países puede explicarse principalmente por la creciente apertura comercial habida en las últimas décadas. Asimismo, se encuentra que el componente idiosincrásico de la volatilidad de los países también está influenciado por las políticas monetarias internasWe rely on a hierarchical volatility factor approach to estimate and decompose timevarying second moments of countries output growth into global, regional and idiosyncratic contributions. We document a “global moderation” of international business cycles, defined as a persistent decline in macroeconomic volatility across the main world economies. This decline in volatility was induced by a reduction in the underlying global component, uncovering a new level of interconnection of the world economy. After assessing the importance of different economic factors, we find that the reduction in overall countries macroeconomic volatility can be mainly explained by the increasing trade openness exhibited in recent decades. Likewise, the idiosyncratic component of countries volatility is also influenced by domestic monetary policie

Fluctuations in global output volatility

We thank the editor Mark M. Spiegel and two anonymous referees for excellent useful comments and suggestions that helped to improve this article. We would like to thank Maximo Camacho, Luciano Campos, Alessandro Galessi, Domenico Giannone, Daryna Grechyna, Carlos Thomas, Gabriel Perez-Quiros, Iryna Sikora, Francesco Zanetti and the participants at the 2018 ASSA meetings, the Econometric Society meeting of Latin American, the International Association for Applied Econometrics Conference, the VIII Zaragoza Workshop on Time Series Econometrics, and at the internal seminar series of the Banco de Espana for helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are in no way the responsibility of the Banco de Espana or Eurosystem. Project PID2019-111708GA-I00 financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.In this paper, we dissect the time-varying output volatility of the main world economies to study its dynamics, spillovers, and determinants, from a global perspective. Our analysis relies on a hierarchical volatility factor model and Bayesian model averaging. We show that the increasing comovement observed in international macroeconomic volatility is substantially larger in developing than in developed countries. Instead, developed countries have exhibited more asymmetric volatility shocks than developing countries in recent times. We also show that, although the downward trend in global volatility is related with increasing trade, idiosyncratic changes in volatility are highly influenced by domestic monetary policies. However, due to the declining role played by these idiosyncratic components over time, policymakers currently face greater constraints when it comes to stabilizing output fluctuations.Banco de Espana or Eurosystem PID2019-111708GA-I00 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103

The world trade network and the environment

This papers analyses the role of the world trade network on the environment. We rely on methods developed for social network analysis to identify the most important countries in connecting trade between all the other countries in the world trade network. We then estimate how the network or indirect effects from trade affect the environmental quality of a country. As the trade networks are endogenously determined by trade and environmental conditions, we use as instrumental variables the growth in the population of trade partners and the growth in the population of trade partners' partners to exploit exogenous variation in the world trade network. Once we simultaneously estimate the environmental, trade, income and network equations using a three-stage least square procedure, we find that network effects harm the environmental quality of developed countries but improve the environment of developing countries

Title length

We document strong and robust negative correlations between the length of the title of an economics article and different measures of scientific quality. Analyzing all articles published between 1970 and 2011 and referenced in EconLit, we find that articles with shorter titles tend to be published in better journals, to be more cited and to be more innovative. These correlations hold controlling for unobserved time-invariant and observed time-varying characteristics of teams of authors

Social networks and research output

We study how knowledge about the social network of an individual researcher - as embodied in his coauthor relations - helps us in developing a more accurate prediction of his future productivity. We find that incorporating information about coauthor networks leads to a modest improvement in the accuracy of forecasts on individual output, over and above what we can predict based on the knowledge of past individual output. Second, we find that the informativeness of networks dissipates over the lifetime of a researcher's career. This suggests that the signalling content of the network is quantitatively more important than the flow of ideas

Dynamics of global business cycles interdependence

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the time-varying interdependence among the economic cycles of the major world economies during the post-Great Moderation period. We document a significant increase in the global business cycles interdependence occurred in the early 2000s. Such increase is mainly attributed to the emerging market economies, since their business cycles became more synchronized with the rest of the world around that time. Moreover, we find that the increase in global interdependence is highly related to decreasing differences in sectoral composition among countries