There is evidence that having more readable abstracts and introductions help authors get cited. I show that, in economics, there is also an effect of readability on the probability of publishing in a Top 5 journal (and in a higher-ranked journal in general). I compute readability measures for a set of working papers and examine the journals in which they get published. My results suggest that previous estimates of the effect on citations are downward biased, as higher-ranked journals are more widely read and cited.
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