Commenter A. Tsai offers an explanation of discipline differences on working papers that is worth posting in full.
I am not certain about this, but I suspect it has to do with the differing traditions of information dissemination in the two fields. In economics (I don’t know anything about law), as you hinted at in the post, posting draft papers on Web sites is encouraged, and one can present a paper at numerous “brown bag seminars” before the paper is finally submitted for publication. When the paper actually appears in the print journal, it is more of an afterthought, because all of the reputation-building and most of the peer-review has already informally taken place.
In public health (I don’t know anything about psychology), it is a little different because medical journals explicitly discourage the practice of presenting a study at multiple conferences or seminars (and many journals request that you disclose the name of the conference or conferences where you have presented). I think this has to do with the emphasis in medicine on “scoops” and being the first to publish this or that finding. Your presenting the findings at a conference undercuts the value of the publication to the medical journal because it undercuts the paper’s contribution to the medical journal’s ability to attract advertising dollars (which are critical to a medical journal’s budget, and therefore critical to the medical societies that publish the journals). I would bet that advertising accounts for a teeny tiny proportion of the budget at journals like AER, QJE, and PE.
This seems right to me. Other thoughts?
