Are connections to decision makers valuable? Do connections lead to better or worse decisions? And if they do, why is that? We set out to answer these questions by studying connections to the editorial board members of over 100 economics and finance journals during 1990-2011. Departments double their annual number of publications in a journal when one of its faculty is present on that journal’s board. When we control for unobserved heterogeneity, the increase is still 23%. More decision power and long service on the editorial board lead to substantially larger annual increases. Effects at the individual level are substantial and highly significant.
We use citation patterns to distinguish between editorial favoritism and editorial search/activism. These patterns suggest that activism outweighs any favoritism. Joint work with Lorenzo Ductor