Predicting the impact of American Economic Review articles by author characteristics

Authors who publish in American Economic Review (AER) have career paths confined to a few prestigious institutions, and they mostly have exceptional past publication performance. In this paper, I show that authors who are educated and work in the top 10 institutions and have better past publication performance receive more citations for their current AER publications. Authors who have published in the top economic theory journals receive fewer citations even after controlling for the subfield of their AER article. The gender of the authors, years of post-PhD experience, and the location of the affiliated institution do not have any significant effect on the citation performance. An opportunistic editor can exploit the factors that are related to citation performance to substantially improve the citation performance of the journal. Such opportunistic behavior increases the overrepresentation of authors with certain characteristics. For example, an opportunistic editor who uses the predicted citation performance of articles to select a quarter of the articles increases the ratio of authors who works at the top 10 institutions from 30.8% to 52.0%.