Many papers in economics that are published in peer reviewed journals are initially released in widely circulated working paper series. This raises the question about the benefit of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal in terms of citations. Specifically, we address the question: to what extent does the stamp of approval obtained by publishing in a peer-reviewed journal lead to more subsequent citations for papers that are already available in working paper series? Our data set comprises about 28,000 working papers from four major working paper series in economics. Using panel data methods, we show that the publication in a peer reviewed journal results in around twice the number of yearly citations relative to working papers that never get published in a journal. Our results hold in several robustness checks.

在同行评审期刊上发表的许多经济学论文最初都是在广泛散布的工作论文系列中发布的。这就提出了关于在引用方面发表在同行评审期刊上的好处的问题。具体而言，我们解决了这个问题：在同行评审期刊上发表而获得的认可印章在多大程度上导致了随后更多对工作论文系列中已有论文的引用？我们的数据集包含来自经济学的四个主要工作论文系列的约28,000个工作论文。使用面板数据方法，我们显示，与从未在期刊上发表过的工作论文相比，在同行评审期刊中发表的论文每年被引用的次数大约是其两倍。我们的结果包含几个稳健性检查。