Why publish in top journals? Publication incentives and binary classification in finance, economics and business

National research evaluation systems based on binary journal classifications provide no formal incentive to target top journals; this distortion is especially consequential in finance and economics, where leading journals are highly selective and review times are among the longest. This paper develops a formal cost-based model of publication choice under binary classification, decomposing the expected cost of obtaining one accepted publication into preparation time, review duration, revision effort, and submission costs, while accounting for differences in acceptance probabilities. The model yields two results. First, when all qualifying journals carry identical formal career value, the rational researcher prefers the lowest-ranked qualifying outlet in the absence of extra-systemic rewards. Second, when reputational and citation returns are included, the model characterizes the break-even condition under which targeting top journals becomes individually rational. Under a conservative parameterization, targeting journals absent from international rankings yields 16.6 times more qualifying publications per unit of time than targeting top journals, implying that extra-systemic returns must exceed 15.6 times the formal career value of a qualifying publication to make top-journal targeting individually rational. Applied to a national research evaluation system based on binary journal classification, 27.0% of qualifying journals fall within the rational arbitrage set, with comparable patterns across finance, economics, and business. These results reveal a structural incentive distortion with direct policy implications for national research evaluation systems based on binary classification: introducing granularity within the qualifying category could help restore incentives to target top journals without fundamentally redesigning existing evaluation frameworks.