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 hypothesis 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 published 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.