The Wall Street Journal

By Amara Omeokwe

July 12, 2020

A 2005 research paper from Mr. Myers and fellow economists Patrick Mason and William “Sandy” Darity found that papers with at least one Black author were more likely to report a finding of racial discrimination than papers with no Black authors.

“The top journals historically have been less willing to take a chance on a theoretical or empirical piece of work that deviates too much from the standard predictions,” Mr. Myers said.

Esther Duflo, editor of the American Economic Review, a journal of the American Economic Association, said in an email that journal referees “tend to be very cautious.”

That dynamic, along with the field’s “reluctance to admit that racism exists,” can mean that “a paper that finds evidence of racial discrimination needs to work particularly hard to make its case with the referees; they will always try to find another story,” said Ms. Duflo, a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

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