Saturday, December 10, 2011

QJE-Applied

The American Economic Association launched three years ago the four American Economic Journals, juniors to the American Economic Review. For a journal, three years is a short time, but I still want to assess where they stand for now. From the get-go, let me express again my disappointment that the AEA did not make them open access, the finance would certainly have allowed it, and there was no real need to have print copies. In fact, issues were lying around the department like junk mail that no one bothers to throw away. That was a rather bad omen for the new journals. How has each fared since.

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics had a horrible start. Editors struggled to fill the first issues as submissions were severely lacking. I suspect this had to do with some very poor choices for the editorial team, to a large extend the usual AEA insiders. A change of editor after a year and some serious recruiting efforts changed all that, and AEJ-Macro is now a success story and the flagship of the AEJs, with impressive impact factors for such a young journal.

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics is rather unremarkable. The market for a new micro journal was thin to begin with. Arguably, the AEA wants to recapture the market share lost to commercial publishers, but with Theoretical Economics launched shortly before (in open access), it was difficult to rally economic theoreticians for this new cause. Unless people finally get fed up with the commercial publishers, AEJ-Micro will remain unnoticed.

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy fares better, but only little. I think it suffers from the fact the most economic research has policy implications, so it is difficult which papers should go there rather than elsewhere. And there are plenty of field journals that attract the top papers in their field. If, say, a health economics paper does not make it in the AER, the author will always prefer sending it to the Journal of Health Economics.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics is the most worrisome. It has essentially been hijacked for the research agenda of the editor, and for the rest it looks like a junior partner not to the AER, but to the Quarterly Journal of Economics, even with the same mafia mentality (and hence the title of this post). I am surprised that the Association has not yet started rectifying the situation, but then again it is run by people close to the editorial team. I am afraid that this journal, despite being so young, is already the epitome of club mentality in publishing.

In summary, an unexpected success, two non-remarkable journals and a basket case. Not a promising start.

10 comments:

Kansan said...

I think your criticism of AEJ: Micro and AEJ: Economic Policy is unfair. These journals are only three years old and no one expects them to have found their groove by then.

I wholeheartedly agree with you on AEJ: Applied Economics. This journal is a scandal.

Anonymous said...

Is the AEA aware of the situation, or are its leaders blinded by their glory?

Anonymous said...

If you look at impact factors, the AEJ-AE you criticize so much is second among AEJs. Obviously, Duflo is doing something right.

Anonymous said...

I think it is your worse post ever...

aej applied is very nice an btw lemieux is a coeditor and a very serious labor economist.

I got an r&r there as a grad student and I am not from top 5...

mOOm said...

I took a look and it certainly seems a very narrow definition of "applied economics" whether the papers individually are good or not.

Economic Logician said...

mOOm: Exactly. It is mostly development economics (and only of a certain kind) with some labor economics (of a certain kind). The four AEJ journals are supposed to cover all of Economics, like the AER does. AEJ-AE is certainly not helping in that task.

Anonymous said...

I see, so you are against applied stuff... that is what this is about...


they are covering almost all of economics...

structural labor can go in aej macro btw...

AEJ applied is a big success story...
The profession if going in this direction btw...

Miss Harvard said...

Corruption in journals is widespread. When Costas Meghir was a Co-Editor for Econometrica he, on occasion, sent his friends papers to their co-authors (on other paper) to referee. Associations should audit the acceptances of Editors to see if there is any cronyism.

Economic Logician said...

To the last Anonymous: No, I am not against applied economics, in fact I cover quite a bit of it in this blog. But you will not that the coverage by subfield here is very different from AEJ-AE. And that is because AEJ-EA has a very peculiar idea what applied economics is.

Anonymous said...

so what exactly is it that you dislike at the AEJ AE journal? I did not get to your point. The journal says it publishes articles on applied (empirical) micro topics and when I go through the list of forthcoming papers, I see quite some diversity of topics covered. Some health, some labor, some development stuff, education, productivity, some behavioral stuff. What is it that you are missing?