Abstract
We analyze nearly 3,300 submissions to International Tax and Public Finance from 2010–2020 to identify trends in authorship, content, and the overall performance of the journal. Doing so reveals several things. First, in terms of authorship and data sources, there is a clear predominance of OECD countries, especially the US and Europe. These locations particularly dominate publications; while non-OECD authors are on 40% of submissions, they only make up 24% of publications. Second, 90% of submissions have a male coauthor. There is not, however, any significant correlation between author gender and the acceptance rate. Third, issues of tax evasion have become ever more prominent in both submissions and publications. Finally, there is a shift in research towards empirical analysis, especially that using disaggregated data.
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Notes
Ozgen (2021) provides a recent survey of the literature on diversity and productivity, indicating that particularly when considered at the appropriate scale, more diverse teams are more productive. We see no reason to believe that the same is untrue for our profession.
Thus Davies, who is affiliate both with University College Dublin and CES-Ifo, would be allocated to Ireland.
This tool was also used by European Economics Association to analyze submissions to the Journal of the European Economic Association for 2019-2020 (European Economics Association, 2021).
These numbers reflect individuals on submissions. Authors with multiple submissions would be counted multiple times.
Typically, each published issue includes one Policy Watch article. These are intended to provide a forum for the discussion of “big ideas” meant to spark discussion and future research. As such, they tend to be more descriptive than regular submissions.
For example, computable general equilibrium models, while calibrated using data, were deemed primarily a theory exercise.
Since many later submissions are still under review, this is why the analysis ends in 2020.
While one can obtain this information from published papers, this is not the case for rejected papers and we therefore were careful to anonymize and protect the information of non-published authors.
There was a slightly smaller decline in the median number of coauthors, from 2.0 in 2010 to 1.8 in 2020.
It is worth noting that in mixed teams, a male is the corresponding author 54.5% of the time.
These numbers count an author with multiple papers multiple times.
The top ten are rounded out by Japan (306), the UK (195), France (191), India (173), and Iran (140).
This is comparable to the distribution of corresponding authors at Journal of Public Economics. See the data at https://journalinsights.elsevier.com/journals/0047-2727.
For papers submitted in 2020 with a final decision as of this writing, far more are rejected when compared to other years. This is because there are a number of 2020 submissions still under review, i.e. a large number of papers that might yet be accepted.
We thank their editorial board for providing this information.
This can explain their lower desk rejection rates as well. For Policy Watch submissions it is 39.5%, for IIPF special issues it is 24.7% and for other special issues it is only 15.6%. Further, Policy Watch submissions are generally handled by the Policy Watch editors while special issues are overseen by guest editors. Regular submissions, however, are almost always handled by one of the editors-in-chief.
By way of comparison, for all submissions to Journal of Public Economics during 2017-2019, the average days to first decision was 48.3. These data can be found at https://journalinsights.elsevier.com/journals/0047-2727.
Note that this includes regular submissions as well as those for Policy Watch and special issues.
This image limits itself to the top 50 keywords.
Note that when calculating relevance for a word cloud, when a given term appears as a sub-part of another, it is not double counted. Thus, “taxation” factors into relevance only when appearing by itself, not as part of “optimal taxation”.
Some were simply unclear on what the data sources and/or country coverage was.
Note that this difference between single country and multi-country submissions is only found when the data includes OECD members.
Two more used state level, all others were at the country level.
All others were at the country level.
It is interesting to note that although behavioural economics has gained a lot of discussion in recent years, experimental data is quite infrequent. Only 21 submissions using such an approach, six of which were published.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Catherine Davies, Darrah McCaffrey, and Liu Yang for valuable research assistance.
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Davies downloaded and anonymized all data. Both authors worked equally on the analysis and writeup.
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Davies is currently an Editor in Chief of International Tax and Public Finance.
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We thank Catherine Davies, Darrah McCaffrey, and Liu Yang for valuable research assistance. All errors are our own.
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Davies, R.B., Studnicka, Z. A review of submissions to International Tax and Public Finance, 2010–2020. Int Tax Public Finance 30, 1185–1201 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-022-09773-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10797-022-09773-7