Romer wrote a paper entitled "Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth" and submitted it to the Journal of Political Economy. The paper was published in the October 1986 issue of the journal after some trouble. Turns out those people that were responsible for giving approval to publish the article were divided on whether or not it should be published. In the end José Scheinkman, who was the editor of the journal sided with publishing the article.
There is however, irony in the paper's publication. Romer no longer believed his result. He no longer considered externalities to offer a promising approach to capturing the economics of knowledge. He slipped something into the published version of his paper that let readers know that his thinking had changed. He wrote how knowledge isn't an technological externality, it is a good.
A for Will.
ReplyDeleteWarsh remarks that Romer getting part of his dissertation into Econometrica was "easy enough". Yikes. Most economists go their whole career without putting together anything good enough to even submit to that journal, much less getting something accepted.
And the growth part of his dissertation was eventually published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1986 — 4-5 years or so after he finished it. This was about the time I first met Romer, and I'll talk about that in class.
Extra credit for a comment explaining what it meant for Scheinkman to recuse himself, and who made the final decision.
The final decision was not made by Scheinkman. It was made by Jim Heckman, who sided with the positive review. Scheinkman “recused himself,” which means to remove oneself because of a conflict of interest. Scheinkman did not want to appear to have any favoritism, and in those days if a paper got mixed reviews it was usually rejected.
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