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Katarina Zigova (Economics / Associated Fellow per Mentorship) talked about "Publication Bias and Academic Career: Evidence from a Meta-Study in Development Economics"

Abstract:
We investigate how an author's career characteristics impact the magnitude and selectivity of a reported estimate in a population of empirical studies on effect of development aid on economic growth published between 1971 and 2011. Expanding the meta data from Doucouliagos and Paldam (2013) by academic career information from authors' biographies, we apply a multiple meta-regression framework to gain the effects of academic age, academic tenure and type of the career on the reported estimates of interest in this field. Our main result is that authors with an academic tenure report on average smaller effects, while the authors working outside academia report on average larger effects. We explain the first evidence by different publication incentives of the tenured and non-tenured authors, while we assume an influential role of institutional stakeholders in the second. Our study contributes to the literature on explaining publication bias in that it shows the non-neutrality of authors characteristics on their reported results.