I always receive a boost to my daily utils when I run across a blog comment from Barkley Rosser:
One funny thing in Moffitt’s piece is his pushing of the new AEJs, which are clearly being pushed hard by the panjandrums of the AEA, with Moffitt wanting to encourage them as the dumping ground for AER rejects. However, despite his claim that they are somehow the next tier behind the top 5 and above all the field journals, this is a ridiculous joke. A couple of them are doing well and might get there someday, partilcularly the Macroeconomics one. But the JME is certainly still well ahead of it, and probably the JMCB also. The other one doing not too badly is Esther Duflo’s Applied one, which is moving up, but still not quite up to the top field journals it competes with. As for the other two, Policy and particularly Micro, they are both doing very poorly, if not outright disasters. One may get lots of brownie points in a department where one of their editors is located, but otherwise they are nearlhy zeroes in terms of getting citations or any serious ranking.
Here is the link.
My question is, what is going on at AEJ Policy and Micro that makes them disasters (Policy is the one where environmental economics papers might fit)? I don't follow what is going on at the top (20!) journals very closely (read: not at all).
