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...

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...

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...

Milton Friedman corresponded with Carolyn Shaw Bell about the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) in 1973. What follows is a distillation of those remarks.

This essay examines the strong influence of the Social Gospel movement on the founding of the American Economic Association. Richard T. Ely, the driving force behind the Association's founding, was also the most popular figure in the Social Gospel movement. The essay discusses Ely's influence in...

The achievements (or lack thereof) of the AEA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) are compared to those of analogous committees in three of our sister disciplines. In psychology, sociology, and history, committees of women professionals advocated and...

As computer networks grow and blanket the planet, they become a community of concurrent processes, which, in their interactions, strategies, and lack of perfect knowledge, become analogous to human market economies. Economics may thus offer new ways of designing and understanding the behavior of...

The appointment of a new Secretary of the American Economic Association provides an opportunity for assessing the Association's membership trends and 'market coverage.' Toward these ends, the author has assembled information about trends in both aggregate Association membership and the...