国外经济期刊简介

Journal publication is now a widely used measure of how successful an economist is. While it is by all means an imperfect measure, most western economic departments impose publication requirement when recruiting and promoting teaching staffs. A study found that the present value of the first finance journal article is between US$19493-$33754(Note 1).

But not all journals are of equal qualities. It is well recognised that the top four economic journals are: American Economic Review (AER), Journal of Political Economy (JPE), Journal of Economic Theory (JET) and Econometrica. They have quite distinct emphases and traditions. Papers in JET and Econometrica are usually more technically involved. Rigorous game theory, econometric theory and general equilibrium theory papers are common. On the contrary, AER and JPE seem to emphasis economic creativity and intuition. Applied economics and papers with simple model are frequently published. An example would be Prof. Ng Yew-Kwang (黄有光) who got a publication in AER when he was still an undergraduate student!(Note 2) (So you can try your luck if you really(!) get some bright idea.)

Other decent economic journals include Journal of Labor Economics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Finance, Journal of Public Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Economic Literature and Journal of Economic Perspective. (Journal of Economic Perspective is recommended to all students afraid of mathematics. It presents the frontier economics with plain English, no equations, no mathematics.)

The followings are some information of the Big 4:

(1) American Economic Review (AER)

Publisher: American Economic Association

- first published in 1911

- regular issues: March, June, September and December

Big Names in the Board of Editors: David H. Romer, Sergio T. Rebelo, Randall Wright

Link: http://www.aeaweb.org/aer/#AERinfo

(2) Journal of Political Economy (JPE)

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

- first published in 1892

- Bimonthly

- analytical and empirical studies in traditional areas as well as in such interdisciplinary fields as the history of economic thought and social economics.

Big Names in the Board of Editors: J. Cochrane, L. Hansen, R. Lucas, R. Topel

Link: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JPE/home.html

(3) Journal of Economic Theory (JET)

- JET emphasizes the theoretical analysis of economic models, including the study of related mathematical techniques.

Big Names in the Board of Editors: Douglas Gale, Philip H. Dybvig, Gerard Debreu, Stephen A. Ross, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki,

Link: http://www.academicpress.com/www/journal/etnojs.htm

(4) Econometrica

Publisher: The Econometric Society

- aim at the unification of the theoretical-quantitative and the empirical-quantitative approach to economic problems by constructive and rigorous thinking.

Big Names in the Board of Editors: Donald W.K. Andrews, Bengt R. Holmstrom, Pierre Perron

Link: http://www.econometricsociety.org/es/journal.html

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Note 1: I don't know the corresponding numbers for economic journal. About half of that, I guess/wish.

Note 2: I had a chance to work as Prof. Ng's research assistant a few years ago. He told me that he had a paper accepted by the AER, but AER asked him to change the title. Prof. Ng insisted not and eventually had the paper published in a low tier journal. (By the way, 黄 有 光 's analytical power is as awful as his laugh!)

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