a)

Endogeneity concerns are:

1.

After submission, those papers, whose authors had already published a paper on NBER

before, might receive the working paper number much more quickly than those being
published for the first time. This is because the staff member, who is assigning the working
paper number, is already familiar with the author (reputation, qualification, etc.) and does not
bother to check the paper more carefully. Moreover, from submitted papers the stuff member
might quickly select already familiar authors papers, assign numbers and then move to the new
authors. This in return might imply that those papers with more recognized and experienced
authors come first in the list and the number of citation is due to the authors recognition
rather than ordering in the NBER announcement E-bulletin.
2.

To find out if the claim above is correct, we should find the correlation between the

position of the paper in the announcement and the number of published papers from the same
author in the NBER. If the correlation is positive and high enough we would doubt the 20 %, if
at all, causality.
With the similar logic, the assignment of the working paper number does not depend only on
one criterion. But better papers are more likely to satisfy those criteria faster (there is probably
not just one staff member assigning the working paper number, especially, if the submission
rate is high). Hence, those papers satisfying criteria faster (better papers) come first in the list.
If we resolve these problems then we will have causal effect.

b)

If we are given the info about submission days, the situation is better. If significant

amount of papers receive working paper number for the upcoming NBER program the paper
belong to, there might still be randomness into the ordering of assigned numbers. We should
regress the rank of the paper in the email announcement on the submission dates. If the earlier
submission implies higher ranking, then the assignment of numbers could be quite random
what we need.
Our original regression was simply:
Number of citations= +*rank+*controls+

Now we use date of submission as instrument. If the date of submission convincingly explains
the variation in the ranking of the paper, the only thing we will need to check is the correlation
of submission days with the error terms. If in the submission day there were many other papers
submitted, the correlation with error term is quite possible because of the reasons outlined in
part (a) endogenous selection of recognized authors papers. In this case our inference will
still be wrong.