AER Topic Selection

Overview

The single most expensive mistake in top-5 economics is writing a polished manuscript around a contribution that was always going to be desk-rejected. This skill is the pre-mortem: stress-test the idea, the audience, and the venue before the introduction is drafted.

AER accepts only a small share of submissions — on the order of 6–8% historically (Card and DellaVigna 2013, Nine Facts about Top Journals), and recent Reports of the Editor put the rate lower still. A large fraction of submissions are desk-rejected before ever reaching a referee; for AER: Insights, founding editor Amy Finkelstein has reported desk-rejecting "roughly 45%" of submissions. Either way, much of a paper's survival probability is determined before the first paragraph is written.

When to Use

• A new project just started and the contribution sentence cannot be written in one line
• The user is undecided between submitting to AER, AER: Insights, or an AEJ
• A prior submission was desk-rejected and the user wants to diagnose whether the topic itself was the problem
• The paper "feels solid" but no senior colleague has agreed to send it to AER

The Top-5 Bar

A paper clears the top-5 bar if and only if all four are true: