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...

The papers from the first year of the American Economic Review are included in the Archives of the American Economic Association. While researching the early years of the AEA, Ann Mari May came across a folder marked "Controversies, Criticisms, etc."-which stood out in the midst of a review of...

The primary objective of this paper is to provide information about minorities (blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans)in economics, at various stages in the education pipeline, and in the labor market. Despite sustained increases in the numbers and percentages of minorities earning bachelors...

This paper documents recent trends in the publication of empirical articles in general-interest economics journals. Three measures of journal quality are estimated. The author finds substantial differences in publication rates of empirical articles among top tier and second-tier journals, and...