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American Economic Association American Economic Association How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists Author(s): Joshua S. Gans and George B. Shepherd Source: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Winter, 1994), pp. 165-179 Published by: American Economic Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2138157 Accessed: 13/10/2008 08:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aea. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Economic Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Economic Perspectives. http://www.jstor.org Journal of EconomicPerspectives- Volume8, Number1- Winter1994-Pages 165-179 How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists Joshua S. Gans and George B. Shepherd D\ o elite economists suffer publication setbacks?Are the economists who produce the important articles content with the refereeing process? We asked over 140 leading economists, including all living winners of the Nobel Prize and John Bates Clark Medal, to describe instances in which journals rejected their papers. We hit a nerve. More than 60 percent re- sponded, many with several blistering pages.1 Paul Krugman expressed the tone of many letters: "Thanks for the opportunity to let off a bit of steam."2 A few economists indicate that no journal has rejected their work. Most of these authors publish mainly in books, and submit few papers to journals. John Kenneth Galbraith explains that his unblemished record "is not entirely the result of the excellence of my writing, much as I would like to believe it so. The deeper truth is that not for many years now have I submitted more than a very few papers to our, as they are called, learned journals. Consequently there has not been a great deal to reject." Robert Solow's experience is similar: "The fact is that I have never had a paper rejected by a journal. Probably this is because I hate writing articles." In contrast, almost all leading economists who regularly submit to journals have suffered rejection, often frequently. In the big leagues, even the best hitters regularly strike out. For example, Paul Samuelson states: "Yes, journals have rejected papers of mine, some of them later regarded as 'classics.' I used 'A forthcoming book-Rejected: Leading EconomistsPonder the Publication Process-presents all of the responses in full, with additional commentary by leading journal editors and further analysis and publication guidance (see Shepherd, forthcoming 1994). 20ne response expressed incomplete enthusiasm: "I consider your project to be basically derisive, and not worth my attention." * Joshua S. Gans and GeorgeB. Shepherdare doctoralstudents in economics,Stanford University,Stanford, California. 166 Journal of EconomicPerspectives to say, with only moderate exaggeration, that the quality of papers of mine at first rejected is not less than the quality of papers accepted at once." Our survey demonstrates that many papers that have become classics were rejected initially by at least one journal-and often by more than one. A publisher rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm because "[ilt's impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A." (Bernard, 1990). Similarly, economics journals can overlook excel- lence. This paper presents a selection of dispatches from the publication battle- front. We begin by discussing rejections that winners of the Nobel Prize and John Bates Clark Medal have endured, and some other notable cases. We then turn to the record of John Maynard Keynes' quirky refusals, when he was the EconomicsJournal's editor, of several important articles and authors. Finally, we offer some thoughts about the implications of these findings.3 The Grim Reaper Knocks On All Doors: Nobel Laureates and Clark Medalists Most winners of the Nobel Prize and John Bates Clark Medal have had papers rejected: only three of the 20 winners who responded in our survey did not admit at least one rejection. The spurned stars were diverse: conservatives, mathematical economists, non-mathematical progressives, Keynesians, mone- tarists, neo-classicists, young, old, authors of papers on a broad range of subjects. James Tobin remembers vividly the rejection of a paper that he prepared as the inaugural Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper (CFDP), after the Foun- dation moved to Yale. "It was a great coup for Yale University and its Economics Department when in 1955 the Cowles Commission moved from Chicago to Yale. It was for me too, because I became the Director of this world-renowned research group. ... I had by fortunate chance a paper all ready to be CFDP 1. What could be better than to have the first paper distributed in Cowles's new life authored by the new director, recruited from the Yale faculty, not imported from Chicago." Tobin's paper for the first time extended probit (0, 1) regression analysis to applications with multiple regres- sors. Tobin submitted the paper to the Journal of the American StatisticalAssocia- tion. The journal rejected it, twice. "The referees for the Journal of the American Statistical Association were not impressed, not even after I re-submitted with many of their specific complaints treated." The paper died until Tobin's 1975 volume of collected essays resurrected it.4 3Unless we indicate otherwise, all of the rejections that we report were unconditional, with no leave to revise and resubmit. 4Table 1 presents the eventual citations for many of the papers that we discuss. Joshua S. Gansand GeorgeB. Shepherd 167 Table I Some Rejected Papers, Listed by Place of Eventual Publication Akerlof, George, "The Market for 'Lemons': Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mecha- nism," QuarterlyJournal of Economics,August 1970, 84:3, 488-500. Arthur, W. Brian, "Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In by Historical Events," EconomicJournal, March 1989, 99, 116-31. Becker, Gary S., "Competition and Democracy," Journal of Law and Economics, 1958, 1, 105-09. Becker, Gary S., "A Theory of the Allocation of Time," EconomicJournal, September 1965, 75, 493-517. Bhagwati, Jagdish, "Immiserizing Growth: A Geometrical Note," Review of Economic Studies, June 1958, 25, 201-05. Black, Fisher, and Myron Scholes, "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities," Journal of Political Economy, May/June 1973, 81:3, 637-54. Buchanan, James M., "External and Internal Public Debt," AmericanEconomic Review, Decem- ber 1957, 47:6, 995-1000. Chichilnisky, Graciela, "Basic Goods, Commodity Transfers and the New International Economic Order," Journal of DevelopmentEconomics, December 1980, 7:4, 505-19. Corden, W. Max, "The Structure of a Tariff System and the Effective Protective Rate," Journal of Political Economy,June 1966, 74:3, 221-37. Debreu, Gerard, "Numerical Representations of Technological Change," Metroeconomica, August 1954, 6:2, 46-68. Fisher, Franklin M., Zvi Griliches, and Carl Kaysen, "The Costs of Automobile Model Changes Since 1949," Journal of Political Economy, October 1962, 70:5, 433-51. Friedman, Milton, "Professor Pigou's Method for Measuring Elasticities of Demand from Budgetary Data," QuarterlyJournal of Economics, November 1935, 50:1, 151-63. Harrod, Roy, "The Law of Decreasing Costs," EconomicJournal, December 1931, 41, 566-76. Hotelling, Harold, "The Economics of Exhaustible Resources," Journal of Political Economy, April 1931, 39:2, 137-75. Jonung, Lars, "Ricardo on Machinery and the Present Unemployment: An Unpublished Manuscript by Knut Wicksell," EconnomicJournal, March 1981, 91:361, 195-205. Kalecki, Michal, "A Theorem on Technical Progress," Review of Economic Studies, May 1941, 7:1, 178-84. Krugman, Paul R., "Increasing Returns, Monopolistic Competition, and International Trade," Journal of International Economics, November 1979, 9:4, 469-79. Krugman, Paul R., "Target Zones and Exchange Rate Dynamics," Quarterly Journal of Economics,August 1991, 106:3, 669-82. Lazear, Edward P., and Sherwin Rosen, "Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimal Labor Contracts," Journal of Political Economy, October 1981, 89:5, 841-64. Lucas, Robert E., "Expectations and the Neutrality of Money," Journal of Economic Theory, April 1972, 4:2, 103-24. May, Robert, and John Beddington, "Nonlinear Difference Equations: Stable Points, Stable Cycles, Chaos," mimeo, Princeton University, Department of Biology, 1975. May, Robert, "Simple Mathematical Models with Very Complicated Dynamics," Nature, June 10, 1976, 261, 459-67. Modigliani, Franco, "Fluctuations in the Savings-Income
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