brycewang-stanford Understanding JAE's Review Process (jae-review-process)
When to trigger
- You want realistic expectations before submitting
- A decision letter arrived and you need to read it correctly
- You are weighing the regular pipeline against the JAE Conference route
- You are unsure who decides and how final the decision is
How JAE review works
- Editor suitability screen. Every submission is first assessed by an editor for suitability. Because JAE enforces a high economics-relevance bar, papers judged off-fit (normative, behavioral, practitioner-oriented, or thin on economic mechanism) can be desk-rejected without review or redirected to another journal via Elsevier's Article Transfer Service.
- Double-anonymized review. Suitable papers go to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers; author and reviewer identities are concealed from each other.
- Editor decision. The Editor makes the final decision, and that decision is final. Treat JAE as a compact editor-final model rather than INFORMS-style departmental area-editor routing. As of 2026-06-22 the journal's Editors are John Core (MIT Sloan), Ed deHaan (Stanford GSB), and Wayne R. Guay (Wharton); reopen the current ScienceDirect editorial-board page to re-verify before naming editors or associate editors in author-facing advice.
What reviewers push on
JAE referees are economics-trained and will press hardest on identification (is the result causal or a correlated-omitted-variable artifact?), the economic mechanism (why would rational agents behave this way?), sample and measurement (proxy validity, sample selection), and alternative explanations. Expect demands for additional cross-sectional partitions, placebo tests, and robustness — not just clarifications.
The JAE Conference pipeline
JAE runs an invitation-only annual conference (sponsored by The Wharton School, Charles River Associates, and Cambridge Business Publishers; 2025 hosted at the University of Pennsylvania). Selected papers are printed in a dedicated special conference issue the following year; non-selected papers may go to a regular issue. The conference carries the same USD 650 submission fee and a USD 5,000 attendee-voted Best Paper award. This is a structural feeder unique among accounting journals — consider it a route for strongly economics-based work.
Reading a decision letter
- Reject (including desk-reject): the economics-fit or identification bar was not met; the decision is final at JAE — reposition for another venue.
- Revise and resubmit (R&R): an invitation, not an acceptance; address every reviewer and editor point. First-round accepts are essentially unheard of.
- Distinguish editor priorities (the framing/contribution and identification that must hold) from reviewer requests (specific tests) — the editor's letter is the binding guide.
Calibrate expectations without inventing numbers
JAE does not publish fixed review timelines or acceptance rates, so do not plan around folklore figures. Editorial Manager's status display is the only reliable signal; resist status-inquiry emails until a status has sat unchanged for an unusually long stretch. What is durable: the suitability screen resolves much faster than full review, resubmissions carry no fee, and the editor's letter — not the referee reports — defines what a revision must accomplish.
Handling a desk outcome
A desk-reject at JAE is a fit verdict, not a quality verdict: the editor is saying the economics-relevance bar or the venue's method profile was missed. If the letter offers an Article Transfer Service redirect, treat it as free routing information — accept only when the suggested Elsevier outlet genuinely matches the paper; otherwise reposition toward JAR, TAR, or RAST on your own terms using the fit tests in jae-topic-selection. Do not resubmit a lightly edited version: the decision is final and the editorial group is compact, so the same editor will likely see it again.
Checklist
- Confirmed the paper clears the economics-relevance bar (desk-reject risk understood)
- Anticipated identification and mechanism challenges from economics referees
- Considered the JAE Conference route for strongly economics-based work
- Understood the decision is the Editor's and is final
- Separated editor priorities from individual reviewer requests in the letter
Anti-patterns
- Submitting off-fit work and being surprised by a desk-reject.
- Treating an R&R as an acceptance.
- Answering reviewers but ignoring the editor's framing concerns.
- Expecting area-editor routing that JAE does not use.
Output format
【Stage】desk screen / out for review / decision
【Decision type】desk-reject / reject / R&R
【Editor priorities】(binding) ...
【Reviewer requests】identification / mechanism / robustness ...
【Conference route?】consider JAE Conference special issue
【Next step】jae-rebuttal (if R&R) or reposition