# The Quarterly Journal of Economics

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Oxford University Press for the Harvard University Department of Economics. Its current editors-in-chief are Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer, and Stefanie Stantcheva.

## History

It is the oldest professional journal of economics in the English language, and second-oldest in any language after the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft [de]. It covers all aspects of the field—from the journal's traditional emphasis on micro-theory to both empirical and theoretical macroeconomics.
Editors of the QJE :
| Editor | Period |
| anonymous | 1886-1947 |
| Edward H. Chamberlin | 1948-1957 |
| Arthur Smithies | 1958-1965 |
| Gottfried Haberler | 1966-1970 |
| Richard A. Musgrave | 1971-1975 |
| Robert Dorfman | 1976-1984 |
| Jerry Green | 1978-1980 |
| Olivier J. Blanchard | 1980-1998 |
| David Hartman | 1980-1984 |
| Joseph P. Kalt | 1980-1984 |
| Malcolm Gillis | 1980-1980 |
| Richard B. Freeman | 1980-1980 |
| Michael Roemer | 1981-1984 |
| David A. Wise | 1982-1984 |
| Lawrence H. Summers | 1985-1990 |
| Eric S. Maskin | 1985-1989 |
| Andrei Shleifer | 1989-1998, 2013- |
| Lawrence F. Katz | 1991- |
| Edward L. Glaeser | 1999-2008 |
| Alberto Alesina | 1999-2003 |
| Robert J. Barro | 2004- |
| Elhanan Helpman | 2009-2014 |
| Jeremy C. Stein | 2012-2012 |
| Pol Antràs | 2015-2021 |
| Stefanie Stantcheva | 2020- |
| Nathan Nunn | 2021- |

## Reception

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2015 impact factor of 6.662, ranking it first out of 347 journals in the category "Economics". It is generally regarded as one of the top 5 journals in economics, together with the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, and The Review of Economic Studies.

## Notable papers

Some of the most influential and well-read papers in economics have been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics including:
* "Distribution as Determined by a Law of Rent" (1891), by John B. Clark
* "The Positive Theory of Capital and Its Critics" (1895), by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk
* "Petty's Place in the History of Economic Theory" (1900), by Charles Henry Hull
* "Fallacies in the Interpretation of Social Cost" (1924), by Frank H. Knight
* "The General Theory of Employment" (1937), by John Maynard Keynes (an expansion on Keynes' General Theory)
* "The Interpretation of Voting in the Allocation of Economic Resources" (1943), by Howard Rothmann Bowen
* "A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth" (1956), by Robert Solow
* "The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" (1970), by George Akerlof
* "Job Market Signaling" (1973), by Michael Spence
* "Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: The economics of markets with imperfect information" (1976), by Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz
* "A Reformulation of the Economic Theory of Fertility" (1988), by Robert Barro and Gary Becker
* "A Theory of Competition among Pressure Groups for Political Influence" (1983), by Gary Becker
* "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth" (1992), by N. Gregory Mankiw, David Romer, and David N. Weil
* "Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting" (1997), by David Laibson
* "Does Social Capital Have An Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation" (1997) by Stephen Knack and Philip Keefer
* "A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation" (1999), by Ernst Fehr and Klaus M. Schmidt
* "Monetary Policy Rules And Macroeconomic Stability: Evidence And Some Theory" (2000), by Richard Clarida, Jordi Galí, and Mark Gertler
* "Information Technology, Workplace Organization, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence" (2002) by Timothy F. Bresnahan, Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin M. Hitt