Overall Competition, Organizational Characteristics, and Opportunistic Behavior: The Paper-Publishing and Paper-Accepting Behavior of Journal Editors

Abstract

The editorial boards of the two Journals under study are organized differently: editorial members of Taiwan Economic Review (TER) coming form National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica; whereas, editorial members of Journal of Financial Studies (JFS), come from various domestic and foreign academic institutions. This paper therefore makes a comparison between TER and JFS editors to ascertain existence/nonexistence of opportunistic behavior. Moreover, if there is opportunistic behavior, it is of interest to know whether or not such opportunistic behavior is systematically tied to organizational form of editorial board. Specifically this paper investigate empirically this issue from two angles: (1) whether or not the editors as a group reveal a tendency to publish more than proportionately research works of their own in the journal they are editing while serving as editors; (2) whether or not the editor-chief reveals a tendency to accept more than proportionally research works submitted by authors with affiliation identical with the editor4n-chief. Major empirical findings are as follows: as for publishing own research works, there is indeed a strong tendency for the editors as a group to engage in opportunistic behavior regardless of which organizational form is adopted; as for publishing research works of authors coming from the same institution identical with the editor-in-chief, the opportunistic behavior of the editor-in-chief is effectively disciplined if the editorial board is composed of members coming from various academic institutions when compared with the case in which the editorial board is composed of members coming primarily from the same academic institution(s).