American Economic Review

• 1. Introduction

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  The American Economic Review published its very first issue in March 1911, and it has been shaping how economists think ever since. Based in Pittsburgh and issued monthly by the American Economic Association, it sits at the top of a field that touches nearly every decision governments, businesses, and households make. What made this journal worth reading for over a century? And what does it take to land a paper in its pages? The answers run from a Victorian-era publication in six parts to a 2011 committee of Nobel laureates, from a controversy signed under a borrowed name to a replication standard that changed how economics is verified.

• 2. A Publication Finds Its Form

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  The American Economic Association was founded in 1885, and for the next two decades it struggled to find a stable publishing identity. From 1886 to 1907, it released the Publications of the American Economic Association, whose first volume appeared across six issues, running from March 1886 through January 1887. Volume IV, issue 2, from April 1889, was typical of the series: a single article, Sidney Webb's "Socialism in England", filled the entire number. A new series launched in December 1897, but it lasted only two issues. A third series followed in 1900 with four issues annually, and that arrangement held until 1908. For the three years before the Review appeared, the association instead put out The Economic Bulletin, also four times a year, with each issue carrying a section called "Personal and Miscellaneous Notes" alongside a run of book reviews. Running parallel to the Bulletin from 1908 to 1910 was the American Economic Association Quarterly, whose header announced it was "formerly published under the title of" the third series, and whose numbering continued from volumes nine through eleven. Out of that layered, restless history, the first issue of The American Economic Review emerged in March 1911.

• 3. Twenty Papers That Defined a Field

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  In 2011, the journal marked its centenary by asking six economists to identify the most important work it had ever published. Kenneth Arrow, Douglas Bernheim, Martin Feldstein, Daniel McFadden, James M. Poterba, and Robert Solow formed what was called the "Top 20 Committee", and their list stretched across more than five decades of economic thought. The oldest paper on the list was Paul Douglas and Charles Cobb's "A Theory of Production" from 1928. F. A. Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" appeared in 1945. Simon Kuznets weighed in with "Economic Growth and Income Inequality" in 1955. The 1963 papers alone included Kenneth Arrow on the welfare economics of medical care and Dale W. Jorgenson on capital theory and investment behavior. Milton Friedman's "The Role of Monetary Policy" dates to 1968. Anne Osborn Krueger's work on rent-seeking appeared in 1974, and Robert J. Shiller's question about whether stock prices move too much to be justified by dividend changes closed the list in 1981. Thirteen of the twenty authors on that list went on to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. One additional paper worth noting from the list is Katharine Coman's "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation", which holds the distinction of being the very first article the journal ever published. It was reprinted in 2011 because of its continuing significance.

• 4. Data, Replication, and Trust

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  In 2004, the American Economic Review adopted a requirement that would set a new standard across the discipline. Authors publishing in the journal had to supply data and code sufficient for other researchers to replicate their results, with that material posted directly on the journal's website. Exceptions were carved out for proprietary data that could not legally be shared. The policy put the burden of verifiability squarely on the researchers themselves, not on editors or readers who might want to check the work. Two years later, in 2006, the journal ranked as the most widely viewed of all 775 journals hosted on JSTOR. It held that position again in 2007. As of the time of publication, the editor-in-chief is Erzo FP Luttmer, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College.

• 5. The Papers and Proceedings Question

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  Every January, the American Economic Association holds its annual meeting, and for many decades the May issue of the Review served as the official record of what was presented there. The May number was titled the Papers and Proceedings issue, and it had a notable quirk: papers selected for presentation did not go through the journal's standard peer review process. The papers were chosen for the conference, not vetted in the way a regular submission would be. That arrangement continued until 2017. Starting in 2018, the association moved those papers to a dedicated outlet, AEA Papers and Proceedings, published separately on an annual schedule each May. A 2010 paper that appeared in one of the final Papers and Proceedings issues was Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's "Growth in a Time of Debt", which generated significant scholarly debate after publication.

• 6. The Nicolas Bearbaki Affair

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  In 2016, an anonymous group of economists chose a particular way to register a serious objection. The group wrote a collaborative note alleging academic misconduct by the authors and editor of a paper published in the American Economic Review. Rather than publish under their real names, they signed the note "Nicolas Bearbaki", a deliberate nod to the French mathematical collective Nicolas Bourbaki, which famously published under a collective pseudonym across the twentieth century. The choice of name signaled that the critique came from a community, not a single complainant, and carried a pointed reference to a tradition of collective intellectual accountability. The note represents one of the few public allegations of misconduct directed at a paper in the journal's history.