When I was a graduate student, I discovered that the <em>Journal of Economic Perspectives</em> embodied much of what I love about the field of economics: the clarity that pierces rhetoric to seek the core of a question; the rigor to identify the causal relationships, tradeoffs, and indeterminancies...

Editing isn't "teaching" and it isn't "research," so in the holy trinity of academic responsibilities it is apparently bunched with faculty committees, student advising, and talks to the local Kiwanis club as part of "service." Yet for many economists, editing seems to loom larger in their...

I welcome the opportunity to join in the celebration of the twenty-fifth birthday of the <em>Journal of Economic Perspectives</em>. It is wonderful to see how this "baby," which I, along with Carl Shapiro and Timothy Taylor, nurtured through its formative years—from 1984 (three years before the first...

The dominance of the AEA program by leading research universities declined substantially over the past four decades, but they have maintained their share of papers published in the Papers and Proceedings issue of the Americn Economic Review. Their share of pages in three highly regarded refereed...

This paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research, meta-regression analysis or MRA. Economics is theory-driven. Yet, we must learn empirically if economics is to advance. MRA offers a more objective statistical method to summarize...

We evaluate policies to increase prosocial behavior using a field experiment with 1,500 referees at the Journal of Public Economics. We randomly assign referees to four groups: a control group with a six-week deadline to submit a referee report; a group with a four-week deadline; a cash incentive...

Over the past four decades the median length of the papers published in the "top five" economic journals has grown by nearly 300 percent. We study the effects of a page limit policy introduced by the American Economic Review (AER) in mid-2008 and subsequently adopted by the Journal of the...

Referees' and editors' behavior is illustrated by data from a random sample of refereeing requests by seven economics journals. Referees tend to be higher-quality (better-cited, prime-age) than authors. Except for a few superstar authors, there is no matching of authors and referees by quality....

In 1996, foreigners represented over half of the doctoral student population in economics, up from 20 percent in 1972. This article presents a profile of foreign students in economics Ph.D. programs in the United States based on survey and interview data collected in 1996. In addition to...

Both overt and covert instances of less than equal treatment for women and men were taken for granted until the so-called 'women's movement' of the l960s, of which CSWEP was a part. 'Economics is a man's field' summarizes the environment in the profession; this and other circumstances have been...