  Scholars present their new research at seminars and conferences, and send
drafts to peers, hoping to receive comments and suggestions that will improve
the quality of their work. Using a dataset of papers published in economics
journals, this article measures how much peers' individual and collective
comments improve the quality of research. Controlling for the quality of the
research idea and author, I find that a one standard deviation increase in the
number of peers' individual and collective comments increases the quality of
the journal in which the research is published by 47%.
