Letter from the co-ordinating editor
On July 1, 2005, I took over as co-ordinating editor of the Review of
Economic
Dynamics. I'm very excited about my new job. The RED is only
seven
years
old. But it has already established itself as one of the premier journals
in economics. The journal has published contributions by some of the
leading economists in the world - including Nobel Laureates James Heckman, Finn Kydland, Robert Lucas, and Edward Prescott - and the
average quality
of the published papers is incredibly high. Just take a glance at
volume
8
of the journal, and you'll see what
I'm talking about!
This quality is reflected in a new journal ranking done by two economists
at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. It shows that the Review of
Economic Dynamics ranks 13th (!) among all economics journals
in terms
of
impact per article, where impact is measured in terms of impact on
economics journals. (See Table 2 of FRBB 05-12
for details.) This
is a remarkable achievement for so young a journal.
Gary Hansen and Tom
Cooley have indeed done a fantastic job of getting the journal off the
ground.
I want to use the rest of this essay to share my ideas about the journal.
One aspect of the journal that I especially like is its broad scope. Some
people perceive the RED as a macroeconomics journal. But this
perception
is wrong. The mission of the Review of Economic Dynamics is to not
to be a
field journal in macroeconomics, but to serve as the flagship journal for
the Society for Economic Dynamics. The scope of the Society is much
broader than macroeconomics. (After all, the next President of the
Society
is David K. Levine, who is
best known for his contributions to economic
theory.) Our board of associate editors at the RED reflects this
large
scope. It includes such scholars as Wolfgang Pesendorfer (economic
theory), Urban Jermann
(financial economics), and Thomas Holmes
(industrial
organization). I can't put it any better than the journal's website does:
"We publish contributions in any area of economics provided they
meet the
highest standards of scientific research." The scope of the journal
is defined not by any particular
field description, but by the interests of
the members of the Society.
I hesitate to be more precise about what those interests are. The journal
has published papers that are contributions to pure theory. It has
published papers that are contributions to pure measurement. It has
published papers that use econometrics in sophisticated ways to explore
the
match between theory and data.
Nonetheless, I do believe that there is a kind of work that has a special
home in the Review: the work that is called "quantitative theory." Many in
the
economics profession remain hostile, or at best ignorant, about
applications of this methodology. The Review regards it as
the
essential
tool for addressing many of the most important questions in economics.
If
you've written a quantitative theoretic paper of any kind, the
Review
provides the most constructive and useful reviewing process available.
I have two goals as co-ordinating editor. First, I want to do what all
editors want to do: to improve throughput speed without reducing the
quality of the review process. My aim is to get turn-around times down to
4 months or less on the vast majority of our submissions. From my years
of
experience as editor/associate editor at various journals, I see no reason
why the review process should take longer than this.
My second goal is more important. For all of us in the Society, the
annual
SED conference has become the most exciting intellectual event of the
year.
I would like to see more of this energy translated into the journal.
There is a simple way for this to happen: the members of the Society all
need to treat the RED as our primary field journal. What does this
mean
in
practice? All members of the Society should follow the Rule:
If you have a paper that is appropriate for the SED meetings, and
you're
not sending it to a top five journal, send it to the Review of Economic
Dynamics.
If we all follow the Rule, I guarantee that the RED will reflect,
even
more
than it does now, the intellectual excitement that we see at the SED
conference. I look forward to receiving your submissions and being your
editor in the next five years!
Narayana
Kocherlakota, Coordinating Editor
Review of Economic
Dynamics