Are leading papers of better quality? Evidence from a natural experiment

Leading papers in a journal’s issue attract, on average, more citations than those that follow. It is, however, difficult to assess whether they are of better quality (as is often suggested), or whether this happens just because they appear first in an issue. We make use of a natural experiment that was carried out by a journal in which papers are randomly ordered in some issues, while this order is not random in others. We show that leading papers in randomly ordered issues also attract more citations, which casts some doubt on whether, in general, leading papers are of higher quality.

Incentives in Economic Departments: Testing Tournaments?

Existing tests of tournament theory have recently been criticized for their failure to distinguish tournaments from other theories that have similar effects like standards and marginal productivity theory (Gibbs, 1994, 1996; Prendergast, 1999). In this paper, we propose a series of empirical tests that allow to make this distinction. We use a dataset of average wages by rank in US economic departments over the period 1977-1997 and link this information to individual production data to test whether wage gaps affect the productivity and cooperative behavior of economists and to control for marginal productivity theory. We find that the wage gap is increasing along the hierarchy, even when controlling for production by rank. Moreover, wages are more sensitive to productivity for higher ranks. We find some evidence that higher wage gaps lead to higher productivity but not that wage gaps depend on the number of contestants nor that they lead to less cooperation.incentives; sorting; tournaments; standards; marginal productivity; economic departments

A report on the workshop on complexity in linguistics: Developmental and evolutionary perspectives

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Review of the 9th international conference on the evolution of language (Evolang9)

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A computational simulation of the genesis and spread of lexical items in situations of abrupt language contact

The current study presents an agent-based model which simulates the innovation and competition among lexical items in cases of language contact. It is inspired by relatively recent historical cases in which the linguistic ecology and sociohistorical context are highly complex. Pidgin and creole genesis offers an opportunity to obtain linguistic facts, social dynamics, and historical demography in a highly segregated society. This provides a solid ground for researching the interaction of populations with different pre-existing language systems, and how different factors contribute to the genesis of the lexicon of a newly generated mixed language. We take into consideration the population dynamics and structures, as well as a distribution of word frequencies related to language use, in order to study how social factors may affect the developmental trajectory of languages. Focusing on the case of Sranan in Suriname, our study shows that it is possible to account for the composition of its core lexicon in relation to different social groups, contact patterns, and large population movements