Journal of Economic Perspectives

Aims & Scope

The Journal of Economic Perspectives aims to bridge the gap between the general interest business and financial press and standard academic journals of economics. The journal publishes four issues per year, which are publicly accessible at no charge, compliments of the American Economic Association. Articles appearing in the journal are primarily solicited by the editorial team. However, we do look at all unsolicited material. In general, with few exceptions, authors of published JEP papers are researchers with a PhD in economics or a closely related field. The Journal of Economic Perspectives attempts to fill part of the gap between refereed economics research journals and the popular press, while falling considerably closer to the former than the latter. The focus of JEP articles should be on understanding the central economic ideas of a question, what is fundamentally at issue, why the question is particularly important, what the latest advances are, and what facets remain to be examined. In every case, articles should argue for the author's point of view, explain how recent theoretical or empirical work has affected that view, and lay out the points of departure from other views. We hope that most JEP articles will offer a kind of intellectual arbitrage that will be useful for every economist. For many, the articles will present insights and issues from a specialty outside the readers' usual field of work. For specialists, the articles will lead to thoughts about the questions underlying their research, which directions have been most productive, and what the key questions are. Articles in many other economics journals are addressed to the author's peers in a subspecialty; thus, they use tools and terminology of that specialty and presume that readers know the context and general direction of the inquiry. By contrast, this journal is aimed at all economists, including those not conversant with recent work in the subspecialty of the author. The goal is to have articles that can be read by 90 percent or more of the AEA membership, as opposed to articles that can only be mastered with abundant time and energy. Articles should be as complex as they need to be, but not more so. Moreover, the necessary complexity should be explained in terms appropriate to an audience presumed to have an understanding of economics generally, but not a specialized knowledge of the author's methods or previous work in this area. The Journal of Economic Perspectives is intended to be scholarly without relying too heavily on mathematical notation or mathematical insights. In some cases, it will be appropriate for an author to offer a mathematical derivation of an economic relationship, but in most cases it will be more important that an author explain why a key formula makes sense and tie it to economic intuition, while leaving the actual derivation to another publication or to an appendix. JEP does not publish book reviews or literature reviews. Highly mathematical papers, research-intensive papers on narrowly focused topics, and papers that address an economic subspecialty in a manner inaccessible to the general AEA membership are not appropriate for the Journal of Economic Perspectives . Our stock in trade is original, opinionated perspectives on economic topics that are grounded in frontier scholarship.

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Source: OpenAlex · Note: citations accumulate over time so older years appear higher

SJR Quartile by Discipline

Scimago ranks this journal separately in each subject category — its quartile can differ by discipline.

Subject Classification