SUBMISSION DEMAND IN CORE ECONOMICS JOURNALS: A PANEL STUDY

I. INTRODUCTION Academic economics journals have proliferated to around 1,500, providing economists a large number of outlets for publishing manuscripts (EconLit n.d.; IDEAS n.d.). Although researchers have examined how the demand for submission for (academic) economics journals responded to nonprice variables such as an editorial policy change on page limit (Card and DellaVigna 2012), surprisingly the price elasticity of demand for submission remains unknown and becomes the focus of this study. The objective of this study was to examine empirically what factors influence authors' decisions on which economics journal to submit to, focusing on three sets of demand factors: (manuscript) submission fee, observed journal quality (such as impact factor and ranking), and journal usage (such as abstract views and library subscriptions). Similar to most of the literature on economics journals, we focused on the economics journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) compiled by the Institute for Scientific Information because JCR journals tend to be viewed as the core or leading academic journals. Two challenges arose in estimating the demand for journal submission. First, submission fee may be endogenous if supply and demand are simultaneously determined, or if economics journals set the fee based on demand variations that the econometrician does not observe and, hence, cannot explicitly specify in the demand model. To reduce the potential endogeneity bias, we surveyed journal editors to obtain and use as an instrument the fee paid to a journal referee for reviewing. The reviewer fee might serve as a good instrument in this case because the reviewer fee, which is a supply side variable, generally is paid by the submission fee. There is little evidence to support that paying referees is correlated with unobserved journal quality such as journal reputation. Indeed, a recent study by Chetty, Saez, and Sandor (2014) found that reviewer fees have little or no effects on quality of the reviewer reports based on an experiment with referees at the Journal of Public Economics, casting doubt on the relationship between reviewer fee and referee report. The second challenge is that journal quality such as journal reputation (or editor reputation) is not observed by the econometrician. Our strategy to address this issue was to use panel data to control for unobserved individual journal effect. By supplementing the JCR citation data with other publicly available data and our two rounds of surveys of journal editors, we constructed a unique panel dataset that contains various journal characteristics such as submission fee, fee paid to a journal referee for reviewing, and the number of new submissions for the years of 2008 and 2013 (Thompson Scientific, Institute for Scientific Information 2008 and 2013). Many researchers have analyzed theoretically the role of submission fee and/or response times in academic publishing (e.g., Azar 2006; Cotton 2013; Heintzelman and Nocetti 2009; Leslie 2005). For a recent example, Cotton (2013) showed that journal quality could be maximized through a combination of both moderate fees and moderate delays, when authors have heterogeneous preferences. Such a result is obviously based on the assumption that authors respond negatively to a submission fee. From an empirical perspective, submission fees raise the cost of submitting an article and therefore discourage the submission of papers, especially those of marginal quality (i.e., a self-selection process regarding the quality of authors' own manuscripts). However, several factors can alleviate the negative impact of submission fees on submissions. First, Azar (2005) pointed out that the rewards for publications in good economics journals are very high compared with the relatively low submission fees. Second, submission fees are sometimes paid by department funds and faculty's grants/research contracts. …