Rejected: Career concerns in the refereeing process

We analyze the effect of career concerns on the refereeing process. We consider a journal editor and two referees who may differ in reputation and ability. A referee’s reputation is public information, while a referee’s ability is private information. We identify an incentive for low-ability referees to reject good papers —a phenomenon we call over-rejection— and find that this incentive increases with the referee’s reputation. We show that over-rejection decreases with competition, referee homogeneity, and the anonymity of the refereeing process. In contrast to low-ability experts, high-ability referees are truthful in equilibrium. Since a referee with a higher reputation is ex-ante more likely to be high-ability, our results suggest that the probability of rejection is inverted U-shaped in the referee’s reputation. We empirically test this result. We use data from Card and DellaVigna (2020) for submissions to four top economic journals in the period 2003-2013 and use the referee’s publication record as a proxy for the referee’s reputation. We find that the probability of sending a negative recommendation increases with the referee’s reputation in the early stages of the career and decreases thereafter, suggesting an inverted U-shape form in line with our theoretical results.