Rejected Again

I am pretty bummed out. On the eve of my departure, I found out that my paper with Wairimu Mugo, “Is Foreign Aid Conditioned upon Institutional Reform?," was rejected for publication again. The paper came out of Mugo's masters thesis that she wrote under my supervision. I keep telling myself that a rejection is better than having no paper to be rejected. ("Tis better to have written and lost than not written at all.")

Writing this paper was something of an experiment I ran to see if there was a side benefit from supervising theses. Supervising a thesis can be a real time sink without much payoff for the supervising faculty member. The opportunity cost is working on your own research, which, we hope, will generate conference invites, publications, citations, raises, awards, and accolades all around. (Oh yeah, also new knowledge useful to the larger world - yadda yadda yadda.) However, if the end product of a thesis is publishable at a decent journal, it very well could be worth the effort. This may not be a good test because development is not my area and one of the referee comments is that we really messed up the literature review.

I am running a simultaneous experiment with another former student, Darshak Patel, that appears to be bearing more fruit. Two ingredients of this experiment are 1) it is in my field so am am better able to place the research and know what would be an important innovation, and 2) as a doctoral student at U. Kentucky, Darshak is still "in the profession" and has a long term interest in seeing his research published (incentive compatibility).

So, ideally, one should only hope for a publishable paper out of a supervised theses if:

1. The student is bright,
2. The topic is in your field, and
3. There is some longer term incentive compatibility mechanism.

Anything else?