American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
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Citation
“American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.” American
Economic Review, vol. 107, no. 5, May 2017, pp. 719–25.
As Published
http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.107.5.719
Publisher
American Economic Association
Version
Final published version
Citable link
http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/116001
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's
policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the
publisher's site for terms of use.
719 https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.107.5.719
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
The American Economic Journal: Applied
Economics(AEJ Applied) was launched by the
American Economic Association in July 2007, and has experienced since then a steady increase in submissions.
The AEJ Applied publishes papers covering a broad range of topics in applied econom-ics, with a focus on empirical microeconomic issues. In particular, it covers labor economics, development microeconomics, health, educa-tion, demography, empirical corporate finance, empirical studies of trade and industrial orga-nization, and empirical behavioral economics. Table 6 gives the distribution of fields covered by the papers published in 2016. It reflects the broad diversity of papers received. Development, labor, and health and education are the main topics (as initially envisioned). The papers have different empirical approaches (from descriptive studies and lab experiments to structural estima-tion), and address a broad array of topics. They are united by the fact that they make a substan-tive and empirical (i.e., not purely methodolog-ical) contribution to important economic issues. As shown in Table 1, the number of first sub-missions is a record 643 for the year 2016.
This represents a 15 percent increase from 2015. We still have four coeditors, and for now can manage with this team. The impact factor is also at its highest yet: at 4.038 cites per paper published in the previous year, we are number 8 this year, just ahead of the American Economic
Review and all the other AEJ journals (!).
Editorial Process
Manuscripts submitted to the AEJ Applied are handled by an editor (Esther Duflo, until December 2016) and three coeditors: Alexandre Mas, Dave Donaldson (who replaced Matthew Gentzkow), and Ilyana Kuziemko. Benjamin Olken joined the team on November 1, 2016. After being processed by the Pittsburgh office staff, the manuscripts are allocated by the editor to one of the coeditors. All subsequent respon-sibility for handling the manuscript, including
the decision to summarily reject papers, choice of referees, and the ultimate disposition of the paper, rests with the person to whom the man-uscript has been assigned. However, this person consults with at least one more member of the editorial team before reaching a “revise and resubmit” decision, and generally in marginal cases as well. The decision letter specifies which coeditor was consulted, if one was. The journal has a policy of avoiding conflicts of interest, and papers are not assigned to an editor if the author is a colleague, coauthor, or recent student.
As of 2011, AEJ Applied no longer follows the double-blind process previously followed by the AEA journals. As other AEA journals do,
AEJ Applied discloses the author’s name to ref-erees. As before, referee names are not revealed to the author. Papers are often rejected without a formal review when the editor in charge of the paper believes the paper is unlikely to be finally accepted in the AEJ Applied. The author’s sub-mission fee is refunded when papers are rejected without formal review.
For manuscripts previously submitted to the
American Economic Review(AER), authors can
Table 1—Manuscripts Submitted and Published, 2007–2016
Previously submitted to the AER Year Submitted Published Submitted Published
2007 69 0 5 — 2008 223 0 36 — 2009 345 34 36 — 2010 344 40 40 — 2011 384 36 33 — 2012 471 40 53 — 2013 525 38 44 — 2014 498 40 38 6 2015 559 35 39 5 2016 643 37 52 11
Notes: Submissions to the AEJ Applied for each year include all new submissions from November 1 of the previous year through October 31 of the stated year. Publications for 2009 include the January and October issues. Publications for all years include the January, April, July, and October issues.
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720 AEA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS
choose to have the AER file forwarded to the AEJ
Applied. That file includes the editor’s decision letter, the referee reports, and, with the referee’s permission, the cover letter to the AER editor. The majority of referees agree to have their cover letters made available, and this informa-tion is sometimes sufficient to reach a decision on the paper. The additional information usually
expedites the review of a paper even when an immediate decision isn’t possible. This feature has been used for 52 papers submitted in 2016 (Table 1), and 11 were ultimately published (the publication rate of 11/52 for manuscripts com-ing from the AER is larger than that of regular papers, and those papers are also handled more rapidly, in general).
Table 2—Status of Manuscripts by Year of Submission, 2012–2016
Submission year Accepted Pending Rejected Summary reject Revise and resubmit Withdrawn Total
2012 47 0 266 156 2 0 471 (10) (0) (56) (33) (0) (0) (100) 2013 33 0 249 237 7 0 525 (6) (0) (47) (45) (1) (0) (100) 2014 31 0 196 268 3 0 498 (6) (0) (39) (54) (1) (0) (100) 2015 34 5 236 276 8 0 559 (6) (1) (42) (49) (1) (0) (100) 2016 21 115 169 318 19 1 643 (3) (18) (26) (49) (3) (0) (100)
Notes: Entries show status as of November 1, 2016. Figures in parentheses show row percents rounded to the nearest integer. Pending manuscripts include submissions and revisions that were undergoing review as of November 1, 2016, while revise and resubmit manuscripts are manuscripts that have been returned and are in the hands of the authors on that date. Summary rejec-tions are manuscripts rejected without referee review.
Table 3––Distribution of First-Time Decision Times, by Submission Year
2014 2015 2016
Months to
response Monthly percent Cumulative percent Monthly percent Cumulative percent Monthly percent Cumulative percent
1 56 56 51 51 48 48 2 21 77 21 72 14 62 3 21 98 25 97 18 80 4 2 100 2 99 17 97 5 0 100 1 100 3 100 6 0 100 0 100 0 100 7 0 100 0 100 0 100 8 0 100 0 100 0 100 9 0 100 0 100 0 100 10 0 100 0 100 0 100 11 0 100 0 100 0 100 12 0 100 0 100 0 100
Notes: Submission year denotes period from November 1 of the preceding year to October 31 of the stated year. The 2014–2015 distributions are the actual distributions. The 2016 distribution is projected from Kaplan-Meier hazards computed from the right-censored distribution of decision times of manuscripts submitted between November 1, 2015 and October 31, 2016. Percents are rounded to the nearest integer. Figures in this table supersede those contained in previous AEJ
721
Editorial Board
The editorial board for AEJ Applied con-sists of Nava Ashraf (LSE), Abhijit Banerjee (MIT), Aimee Chin (Houston), Janet Currie (Princeton), Gordon Dahl (UCSD), Jan De Loecker (Princeton), Pascaline Dupas (Stanford), Raymond Fisman (Boston University), Alessandro Gavazza (LSE), Rema Hanna (Harvard), Gordon H. Hanson (UCSD), Dean Karlan (Yale), Patrick Kline (UC-Berkeley), Peter Kuhn (USC), Victor Lavy (Warwick), Ethan Lewis (Dartmouth), Atif Mian (Princeton), Karthik Muralidharan (UCSD), Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach (Northwestern), Alan Sorensen (Wisconsin), Tavneet Suri (MIT), Chad Syverson (Chicago), and Miguel Urquiola (Columbia).
Editorial Data and Process
For the year ending October 31, 2016, the journal received 643 new submissions. The ultimate publication rate was 6 percent for
papers submitted in 2014 (plus 3 papers that are still in the R&R stage). This makes the AEJ
Applied an extremely competitive journal.
AEJ Applied has established a tradition of quick and efficient service for authors, of which we are very proud. The mean decision time for first decision continues to be very low: 30 days in 2016 (down from 33 days in 2015, similar to 30 days in 2014, down from 32 days in 2013, 39 days in 2012, and 41 days in 2011). It is in part due to the prescreening process, but not only that factor. As shown in Table 3, we are particu-larly attentive to avoid long tails. Our objective is to avoid papers older than three months at all costs. After a perfect record until 2014, we have
Table 4—Average Processing Times by Year of Publication
Submission to acceptance Weeks from acceptance to
publication Total
weeks Weeks inreview
2012 46 14 35
2013 41 13 36
2014 43 15 41
2015 41 15 41
2016 44 15 38
Note: Total weeks column shows the combined time a man-uscript spent in review at AEJ Applied and the time taken by authors to develop their various revisions.
Table 5—Article Length, by Year
Number
of articles page lengthAverage
2010 40 26 2011 36 27 2012 40 28 2013 38 28 2014 40 27 2015 35 28 2016 37 31
Note: The table refers to the January, April, July, and October issues of AEJ Applied.
Table 6—Subject Matter of Published Manuscripts, 2016
(Counts of Areas) Subject category
A—General economics and teaching 1 B—History of economic thought, methodology,
and heterodox approaches
0
C—Mathematical and quantitative methods 4 D—Microeconomics 11 E—Macroeconomics and monetary economics 2 F—International economics 1 G—Financial economics 4 H—Public economics 8 I—Health, education, and welfare 18 J—Labor and demographic economics 21 K—Law and economics 5 L—Industrial organization 8 M—Business administration and business economics; marketing; accounting 2 N—Economic history 3 O—Economic development, technological change, and growth
12
P—Economic systems 2 Q—Agricultural and natural resource economics; environmental and ecological economics 6 R—Urban, rural, and regional economics 6 Y—Miscellaneous categories 0 Z—Other special topics 3
Notes: Derived from JEL codes reported for each manu-script submitted to AEJ Applied. Entries represent totals for January, April, July, and October issues.
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722 AEA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS
become less good at that recently, but maintain a respectable record. In 2016, 80 percent of papers were decided within 3 months, 97 per-cent within 4 months, and 3 perper-cent between 4 and 5 months.
We are also keen to offer authors a relatively “complete” contract, and the vast majority of papers that are sent for revision are ultimately accepted, usually without being returned to ref-erees. The few papers that were rejected after a first revise and resubmit were usually papers first sent to the AER, which were not sent to referees the first time around, and thus have not wasted much of the authors’ time. In very few occasions, we had to reject a revision when the robustness checks requested showed the results not to be robust.
The average time in review from initial receipt to acceptance was 15 weeks, and the average lag from acceptance to publication was 38 weeks (Table 4).
Table 5 gives the average page length for manuscripts published in 2016. This remained roughly stable at 31 pages. The AEJ Applied does not enforce the AER page limit at the sub-mission stage.
AEJ Applied has the same data posting pol-icy as the AER, requiring authors of accepted papers who employ data in econometric analy-sis, simulation models, or experiments to post their data and programs on the journal website. Table 7 gives the statistics on data posting for 2016. Every single paper published had data,
and the data were published without ex post exemptions, although many papers (18 out of 37) have restrictions on what they can post. The current policy is that these limits are declared ex ante, which we found to be quite useful.
The journal has also benefited tremendously from the behind-the-scenes work of Managing Editor Michelle DeBlasi, Assistant Managing Editor Kelly Andrews, and Editorial Assistants Lauren Gattos and Emily Sisco. Their contribu-tions are gratefully acknowledged.
We are more than grateful for the care and the speed with which referees are replying to our requests. The journal could not function with-out them. I also want to take this opportunity to thank my Coeditors, Alexandre Mas, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Dave Donaldson, along with Benjamin Olken, who just joined us. Working with this great team is the best part of the job. I would also like to thank Thomas Lemieux, Liran Einav, and Matthew Gentzkow for serving before them.
This report is bittersweet, since this is my last with the journal that I was with since 2007. I won’t be too far from it since I am joining the
AER. But this has been a wonderful experience to start a journal from scratch and see it bloom and flourish. Alexandre Mas will replace me as Editor as of January 1, 2017. I know the jour-nal is in good hands with him and his wonderful team, and I am happy that I will now be able to submit to it.
Esther Duflo, Editor
Table 7—2016 Data-Posting Policy Statistics
Exemptions
Issue
Number of papers
Papers
with data Full Partial
First-round compliance Second-round compliance Noncompliance January 10 10 0 4 10 0 0 April 8 8 0 5 8 0 0 July 10 10 0 5 9 1 0 October 9 9 0 4 9 0 0 Total 37 37 0 18 36 1 0
723 Abaluck, Jason Abraham, Katharine Adhvaryu, Achyuta Agan, Amanda Aizer, Anna Akee, Randall Aker, Jenny Albouy, David Aldy, Joseph Almond, Douglas Alsan, Marcella Ambler, Kate Amodio, Francesco Anderson, Michael Aragon Sanchez, Fernando Arcidiacono, Peter Arnold, David Asher, Sam Ashraf, Nava Attanasio, Orazio Aucejo, Esteban Azoulay, Pierre Bai, Jie Bailey, Martha Bandiera, Oriana Barankay, Iwan Bartik, Alex Baum-Snow, Nathaniel Bazzi, Samuel Beam, Emily Beaman, Lori Beauchamp, Jonathan Berry, James Best, Michael Bhagwat, Vineet Bharadwaj, Prashant Bhavnani, Rikhil Bitler, Marianne Blanes i Vidal, Jordi Blattman, Christopher Blau, David Blau, Francine Bleakley, Hoyt Bold, Tessa Booij, Adam Borgschulte, Mark Boustan, Leah Bramoulle, Yann Brandt, Loren Breza, Emily Brinch, Christian Bruhn, Miriam Bryan, Gharad Bulman, George Burchardi, Konrad Bursztyn, Leonardo Cáceres-Delpiano, Julio Cadena, Brian Cage, Julia Cai, Jing Callen, Michael Campante, Filipe Cantoni, Enrico Card, David Carranza, Eliana Carrell, Scott Casaburi, Lorenzo Casey, Katherine Cattaneo, Matias Cawley, John Cesarini, David Chalfin, Aaron Chandrasekhar, Arun Chaney, Eric Charness, Gary Chen, Alice Chen, Daniel Chen, Stacey Chen, Yan Chin, Aimee Chou, Shin-Yi Chowdhury, Shyamal Chyn, Eric Clark, Andrew Clark, Damon Clay, Karen Cohen, Alma Cohen, Jessica Cohn, Alain Cole, Shawn Collins, William Colmer, Jonathan Cook, Philip Cortes, Patricia Courtemanche, Charles Cullen, Julie Dahl, Gordon Das, Jishnu De Giorgi, Giacomo Dean, Joshua Dell, Melissa Dercon, Stefan Deryugina, Tatyana Deschenes, Olivier Devereux, Paul Di Tella, Rafael Diamond, Rebecca Dinerstein, Michael Dinkelman, Taryn Dizon-Ross, Rebecca Dobbie, Will Dobkin, Carlos Dobridge, Christine Doleac, Jennifer Dorn, David Doyle, Joseph Draca, Mirko Dube, Oeindrila Dupas, Pascaline Durante, Ruben Dustmann, Christian Eckel, Catherine Egger, Peter Eli, Shari Emerick, Kyle Engbom, Niklas Enikolopov, Ruben Eriksson, Katherine Exley, Christine Faber, Benjamin Faberman, R. Fack, Gabrielle Feigenbaum, James Ferman, Bruno Ferraz, Claudio Ferreira, Fernando Fetzer, Thiemo Field, Erica Figlio, David Finan, Frederico Firth, John Fischer, Greg Fishback, Price Fisman, Raymond Fitzpatrick, Maria Flaaen, Aaron Flory, Jeffrey Fogli, Alessandra Folke, Olle Fortin, Nicole Frandsen, Brigham Fuchs-Schuendeln, Nicola Fujiwara, Thomas Gadenne, Lucie Galbiati, Roberto Galiani, Sebastian Gallagher, Justin Ganong, Peter Gans, Joshua Garthwaite, Craig Gazze, Ludovica Gelber, Alexander Geruso, Michael Gicheva, Dora Gil, Ricard Article Referees for 2016
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724 AEA PAPERS AND PROCEEDINGS
Gine, Xavier Glennerster, Rachel Gneezy, Uri Goldberg, Jessica Goldin, Jacob Goldsmith-Pinkham, Paul Goldstein, Markus Goncalves, Felipe Gonzalez-Navarro, Marco Goodman, Joshua Goodwin, Barry Goolsbee, Austan Gordon, Nora Gould Ellen, Ingrid Gowrisankaran, Gautam Greenberg, Kyle Gregory, Jesse Grenet, Julien Gross, Tal Guiteras, Raymond Gulesci, Selim Guren, Adam Gurgand, Marc Guryan, Jonathan Haggag, Kareem Handbury, Jessie Handel, Benjamin Hanna, Rema Hansen, Benjamin Harari, Mariaflavia Harmon, Nikolaj Harris, Douglas Hart, Cassandra Hartley, Daniel Hassan, Tarek Haushofer, Johannes Heaton, Paul Heller, Sara Hendren, Nathaniel Hilger, Nate Hirsch, Barry Hjort, Jonas Hodgson, Charles Hoffman, Mitchell Holzer, Harry Homonoff, Tatiana Hornbeck, Richard Hossain, Tanjim Hsiang, Solomon Hudson, Sally Hunt, Jennifer Hussam, Reshmaan Hyman, Joshua Ichino, Andrea Imas, Alex Imberman, Scott Imbert, Clement Insler, Michael Iyer, Lakshmi Iyer, Sriya Jacks, David Jacoby, Hanan Jaeger, Simon Jakiela, Pamela Jayachandran, Seema Jedwab, Remi Johnston, Andrew Jones, Benjamin Joyce, Geoffrey Just, David Kahn, Lisa Kaplan, Greg Kapustin, Max Karlan, Dean Kato, Takao Kaur, Supreet Kearney, Melissa Kessler, Daniel Keys, Benjamin Kinnan, Cynthia Kirwan, Barrett Kline, Patrick Klor, Esteban Kolstad, Jonathan Kopczuk, Wojciech Kovak, Brian Kowalski, Amanda Kroft, Kory Krueger, Alan Kudamatsu, Masauyki Kuhn, Peter Kuminoff, Nicolai La Ferrara, Eliana Lacetera, Nicola Lamadon, Thibaut Landais, Camille Lang, Kevin Lange, Fabian Larreguy, Horacio Lavecchia, Adam Lavy, Victor Lefgren, Lars Leight, Jessica Lemieux, Thomas Leon, Gianmarco Leonard, Kenneth Leung, Pauline Levine, Phillip Lewis, Ethan Li, Danielle Lim, Claire Lindner, Attila Lindo, Jason Lindquist, Matthew Lindqvist, Erik Liu, Elaine Llull, Joan Løken, Katrine Low, Corinne Lowe, Matt Luca, Michael Lucas, Adrienne Lusardi, Annamaria Macchiavello, Rocco Machin, Stephen MacLeod, William Magruder, Jeremy Mahoney, Neale Manacorda, Marco Mangum, Kyle Manova, Kalina Mansfield, Richard Marie, Olivier Marinescu, Ioana Mariotti, Martine Marquez-Padilla, Fernanda Martinez Bravo, Monica Martorell, Paco Marx, Benjamin Matray, Adrien Maurel, Arnaud Maurin, Eric Mazumder, Bhashkar Mbiti, Isaac McHenry, Peter McKelway, Maddie Mckenzie, David Meager, Rachael Meara, Ellen Meckel, Katherine Meer, Jonathan Meier, Stephan Mello, Steven Melzer, Brian Meng, Xin Michaels, Guy Michalopoulos, Stelios Miguel, Edward Miller, Conrad Mironov, Maxim Mitman, Kurt Mitton, Todd Mobarak, Ahmed Moehling, Carolyn Monras, Joan Mookherjee, Dilip Mueser, Peter Muralidharan, Karthik Naidu, Suresh Naritomi, Joana Nath, Anusha Neidell, Matthew Neilson, Christopher Niederle, Muriel
725 Novosad, Paul Olivetti, Claudia Olken, Benjamin Ost, Ben Oster, Emily Ouss, Aurelie Owens, Emily Ozbeklik, Serkan Pallais, Amanda Pan, Jessica Parent, Daniel Pariente, William Paserman, M. Daniele Pavan, Ronni Payne, A. Pei, Zhuan Pierce, Justin Polyakova, Maria Pons, Vincent Pop-Eleches, Cristian Pope, Devin Pradhan, Menno Prina, Silvia Puglisi, Riccardo Qian, Nancy Quintana-Domeque, Climent Rao, Gautam Rathelot, Roland Rauch, Ferdinand Reber, Sarah Rees, Daniel Rigol, Natalia Robinson, Jonathan Rockoff, Jonah Rodriguez-Planas, Nuria Rosales-Rueda, Maria Rossin-Slater, Maya Roth, Benjamin Roth, Sefi Royer, Heather Saavedra, Juan Sacerdote, Bruce Sadoff, Sally Sahm, Claudia Salvanes, Kjell
Sanchez de la Sierra, Raul Santos, Andres Sapienza, Paola Sarsons, Heather Schady, Norbert Schaner, Simone Schechter, Laura Schilbach, Frank Schlockermann, Jakob Schneider, Henry Schofield, Heather Schulhofer-Wohl, Sam Schwandt, Hannes Schwartzstein, Joshua Scott-Clayton, Judith Seim, Katja Seira, Enrique Sekhri, Sheetal Shah, Manisha Shastry, Gauri Shaw, Kathryn Shenoy, Ashish Shoag, Daniel Shrestha, Maheshwor Shue, Kelly Singhal, Monica Smith, Austin Solis Vivallos, Alex Sorensen, Alan Sorkin, Isaac Sparber, Chad Spears, Dean Speer, Jamin Sprenger, Charles Stanton, Christopher Steinwender, Claudia Stinebrickner, Todd Storeygard, Adam Stromberg, David Sukhtankar, Sandip Suri, Tavneet Sydnor, Justin Tahoun, Ahmed Tanaka, Shinsuke Timmins, Christopher Todd, Petra Troesken, Werner Troiano, Ugo Turner, Lesley Turner, Matthew Turner, Sarah Urquiola, Miguel Valletta, Robert Van Soest, Daan Voena, Alessandra Vogl, Tom Wacziarg, Romain Waldinger, Fabian Walters, Christopher Wang, Jin Wang, Shing-Yi Wang, Yongxiang Washington, Ebonya Wasserman, Melanie Watson, Tara Weber, Andrea Weber, Roberto Weele, Joel Weese, Eric Weinberg, Matthew Whaley, Christopher Wiswall, Matthew Wozniak, Abigail Wüst, Miriam Xandri, Juan Pablo Yagan, Danny Yang, Crystal Yang, Dean Yankovich, Michael Yannelis, Constantine Yelowitz, Aaron Yin, Wes Yuchtman, Noam Zafar, Basit Zeltzer, Dan Zidar, Owen Ziebarth, Nicolas Zimmerman, Seth Zucker, Ariel Zucman, Gabriel
