Desk rejection in an academic publication market model with matching frictions

Subject to a huge and growing number of journal titles in business and economics, scholars sometimes target the wrong journal. Editors resort more and more to paper pre-screening, and desk reject those that do not fit well to the editorial line. This paper provides a dynamic analysis of the market for academic publications that brings into the picture these matching frictions. The key modelling device is a paper-journal matching function, similar to the matching function traditional in labor economics. Our main endogenous variables are the submission fee and the tension in the publication market, itself directly related to the number of journal titles.