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The Journal of Economic Perspectives: Submission Guidelines


Considerations for those proposing topics and papers for JEP

Articles appearing in the journal are normally solicited by the editors and associate editors. A handful of unsolicited papers are also accepted each year.

Philosophy and style

The Journal of Economic Perspectives attempts to fill part of the gap between refereed economics research journals and the popular press, while falling considerably closer to the former than the latter. The focus of JEP articles should be on understanding the central economic ideas of a dispute, what is fundamentally at issue, why a particular question is important, what the latest advances are, and what questions remain to be examined. In every case, articles should argue for the author's point of view, explain how recent theoretical or empirical work has affected that view, and lay out the points of departure from other views.

Articles in many other economics journals are addressed to the author's peers in a subspecialty; thus, they use tools and terminology of that specialty and presume that readers know the context and general direction of the inquiry. By contrast, this journal is aimed at all economists, including those not conversant with recent work in the subspecialty of the author, including those who apply their economics in teaching undergraduates or work outside academia, and including those with rusty technical tools. The goal is to have articles that can be read by 90 percent or more of the AEA membership, as opposed to articles that can be figured out given enough time and energy. Articles should be as complex as they need to be, but not more so. Moreover, the necessary complexity should be explained in terms appropriate to an audience that can be presumed to have a specialized knowledge of economics generally, but not of the author's methods or previous work.

The Journal of Economic Perspectives is intended to be scholarly without relying too heavily on mathematical notation or mathematical insights. In some cases, it will be appropriate for an author to offer a mathematical derivation of an economic relationship, but if so, that author must explain why that formula makes sense, and tie it to economic intuition.

We hope that most articles will offer a kind of intellectual arbitrage that will be useful for every economist. For many, the articles will present insights and issues from a specialty outside the readers’ usual field of work. For specialists, the articles will lead to thoughts about the questions underlying their research, which directions have been most productive, and what the key questions are.

If you are not familiar with our journal, please review the table of contents of previous issues before submitting a proposal. Highly mathematical papers, papers exploring issues specific to one foreign (non-U.S.) country (i.e. the state of agriculture in Ukraine), and papers that address an economic subspecialty in a manner inaccessible to the general AEA membership are not appropriate for the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Proposals do not have to be completed papers. Since most JEP articles are solicited you may want to simply propose a topic and suggest authors that might be able to write on that topic.

Correspondence regarding possible future articles for JEP may be sent (electronically please) to the assistant editor, Ann Norman, at <anorman "at" jepjournal.org>.

Copyright © 2009 JEP



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David Autor (MIT) has succeeded Andrei Shleifer (Harvard) as editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

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