Two recent papers present convergent evidence that the marketplace of ideas in academic economics is less than efficient:

1. Jorg Peters and co-authors show that comments published in the flagship American Economic Review are cited far less than the original research that they correct. Even when the authors of the original paper concede that the comment substantively tempers their conclusions, the comment has orders of magnitude fewer citations than the original paper. This is a failure of Bayesian updating.

2. Dirk Bethmann and co-authors demonstrate that the top-5 Quarterly Journal of Economics, which is published by Harvard, gives more space to contributions from Harvard faculty than is optimal (or less space to contributions from non-Harvard faculty than is optimal). The average contribution by Harvard faculty published in the QJE is less cited than is the average contribution by faculty from other institutions or by Harvard faculty publishing in other top-5 journals.