Under Romanian law, prisoners can shave 30 days off their jail terms for every book of scientific value that they have published
…While in prison for graft offences, politicians and businessmen in particular are churning out papers in order to take advantage of the loophole
…According to the country’s prison administration, 415 scientific works written by prisoners were published between the start of 2013 and December 9, 2015. In 2012, there were just seven.
Source. My favorite bit (emphasis mine):
There are strong suggestions that many of the books are being written by ghostwriters, or at least heavily guided by outside research assistants, who then pass the text on to the prisoners who handwrite them – the manuscripts must be handwritten rather than typed – and pay for a small print run of a few hundred copies.
Replace “text” with “Stata code” and this starts to sound like economics professors.
Hat tip to Paul Lagunes.
Evidence suggests Romania’s richest prisoners use research assistants to shorten sentence via @cblatts https://t.co/e7orv5lzYB
“Publish or punished” https://t.co/t9hE4UDvWn #blogs #feedly
“Publish or punished” https://t.co/8dZM1lFbVJ #economics via @cblatts
Publish or punished – Chris Blattman https://t.co/EfLwwWxoMo
Publish or punished – https://t.co/njrOsnAIk7
https://t.co/WZGD8hbseL Haha! Think I should try and get into a Romanian prison…
@cblatts I suppose your field experiments would take on a very different form.
Publish or punished https://t.co/cqV3u9kq39
@andreweckford As you can imagine, some wealthy criminals are exploiting this loophole using ghostwriters. https://t.co/7VPItAmRCC
@cblatts exact opposite in Korea, prosecutors seek jail time for 179 plagiarizing profs. https://t.co/2uKozMEFUU
This is what happens when you let prisoners shave time off their jail term by producing research https://t.co/lYtl3tuDMH
@cblatts “I’ll just leave my affiliation blank” -Prisoner Probably
LOL: “Replace “text” with “Stata code” and this starts to sound like economics professors.” https://t.co/Lw9EM2wmiK via @cblatts rss feed
[email protected] They’ve got heavy competition for “scientific value” from Romanian universities—Economics as case in point https://t.co/CKbVEv9aQN