How to Write an American Economic Review Cover Letter

Source: Manusights editorial framework for American Economic Review cover letters

Notice what is absent: no abstract restatement, no paragraph on why the result matters, no journal flattery. Those belong in the manuscript. A letter that argues significance is reading as if AER wanted a persuasive page, which it does not.

Two sentences carry the editorial weight of the whole letter. Copy them, then check that they are true before you submit.

This manuscript reports original work that has not been published previously and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. All authors have read and approved this submission.

The first sentence is the non-duplication and exclusive-submission declaration: AER states that papers under consideration for publication at another journal are ineligible for submission. The second is the all-authors-approved line. If a related paper by the same authors is under review somewhere, the exclusive-submission sentence is not false on its own, but you must add the related-work disclosure described above. AER treats undisclosed parallel work as an integrity matter, not a formatting one.

Because AER discourages the persuasive letter, the framing that would have gone in the letter belongs in your 100-word abstract and introduction. The one-line rule for the contribution sentence:

Avoid contribution lines that describe a field-specific application.
Use contribution lines that name a result of broad cross-subfield interest.

Compare these two full examples.

Weak contribution line:

"We estimate the effect of a state minimum-wage increase on teen employment in one US state using a difference-in-differences design and find a small negative effect."

Why it fails: this is a competent field paper. It speaks to labor economists in one institutional setting, and an AER coeditor reads it as a better fit for AEJ: Applied Economics or a field journal. There is no broad-economics consequence the rest of the field needs.

Stronger contribution line:

"We show that the standard difference-in-differences estimator is biased under staggered policy adoption with heterogeneous effects, propose a consistent estimator, and use it to overturn a result that the conventional estimator had established, with implications across labor, public, and development economics."

Why it works: the result generalizes beyond one institutional setting, it changes a conclusion the field believed, and economists outside the immediate subfield have a reason to care. That cross-subfield reach is exactly the breadth screen the AER coeditor applies on the first read, and it is why the persuasive work belongs in the manuscript rather than in a not-required letter.

Three things belong in or alongside every AER submission, and the cover letter is the place to confirm the ones that are not handled in a separate form.

Coeditor routing and conflicts, not suggested referees. This is where AER diverges most from the generic cover-letter advice. Because a cover letter is not required at AER, there is no suggested-referee field either. Instead, during submission you can request one or more specific coeditors to handle the paper, and you are asked whether you are aware of any coeditor with a conflict of interest.

When a conflict is identified, the paper is assigned to a different coeditor under confidentiality procedures. So do not pad the letter with 3 to 5 suggested referees you might list at another journal; AER did not ask for them, and you cannot exclude reviewers through the cover letter the way some journals allow. Match the coeditor request to the paper's methodological field, and name any conflicted coeditor clearly.

Preprint and working-paper disclosure. Economics circulates working papers heavily, so if your paper is posted as a preprint on SSRN, NBER, arXiv, or an institutional working-paper series, disclose the preprint link in the cover letter so the editorial office can match the circulating version. An undisclosed working paper that surfaces during review reads as concealment, even when it was an oversight, and it is exactly the kind of substantive information AER's not-required letter exists to carry.

Disclosure Statements and exclusive submission. Each (co)author must prepare a separate Disclosure Statement PDF; submissions without them are considered incomplete and will not be reviewed. The cover letter should confirm the Disclosure Statements are included and restate the exclusive, original-submission declaration. For field experiments, the AEA RCT Registry identification number is supplied during submission, and IRB or human-subjects approval is addressed under the AEA Disclosure Policy where relevant.

Data and code availability. AER follows the AEA Data and Code Availability Policy: prior to acceptance, authors of empirical, simulation, or experimental papers must provide data, code, and details sufficient to permit replication, deposited in the AEA Data and Code Repository with a data availability statement. Here is the line that trips authors up: it is generally not acceptable that data be available "upon request" if the authors themselves must approve the request.

A master script is strongly encouraged, and all programs that build the analysis data and produce the results must be included. The cover letter is the right place to flag any restricted or confidential data and the access path before review, so the AEA Data Editor sees the constraint up front.

A few mechanics worth knowing while you draft. AER runs on the AEA ScholarOne Manuscripts platform, the abstract cap is 100 words, and the manuscript should not exceed roughly 40-45 formatted pages. The AEA submission fee is $200 for members and $300 for nonmembers in high-income countries, lower in middle-income countries, and $0 for low-income-country authors, with a 50 percent refund on papers rejected without review.

None of that fee or length detail belongs in the cover letter itself, but it shapes the AER vs AER:Insights vs AEJ decision you state at the top.

In our pre-submission review work with American Economic Review manuscripts, the cover letter is rarely where a paper dies, but the editorial decision the cover letter is supposed to support is exactly where most desk rejections start. Across the economics manuscripts we pre-screen for AER and its top-5 siblings, four named patterns recur, and each maps to a specific manuscript component the handling coeditor checks before assigning referees. Each is testable against your own submission before you upload.

A strong field paper pitched as general-interest with no broad-significance argument. This is the single most common AER failure we see. The cover letter and abstract assert that the result matters for "economics," but the introduction never makes the cross-subfield case: the paper is a clean estimate in one institutional setting that speaks to one field.

The AER coeditor screens for breadth of topic and interest to the AER audience, and a field-narrow contribution gets routed to AEJ: Applied, AEJ: Micro, or a field journal. When we review an AER draft, we check whether the introduction names a result other subfields have a reason to use, and if it does not, we tell the author the honest target is an AEJ before they pay the AER fee.

Missing or vague data-and-code acknowledgement. We repeatedly see AER cover letters and data availability statements that promise data "upon request" or stay silent about a confidential dataset. Both collide with the AEA Data and Code Availability Policy, where author-gated access is generally not acceptable and a restricted-data path must be documented.

The component this exposes is the replication package: a paper that cannot meet the policy before acceptance is a paper that will stall at the AEA Data Editor's reproducibility check. In review we flag any empirical result whose data source is not deposit-ready, because surfacing that at the cover-letter stage is far cheaper than surfacing it after a conditional acceptance.

Over-claiming identification in the contribution line. A recurring pattern in AER submissions is a cover letter and introduction that assert a causal interpretation the empirical design does not support: a difference-in-differences with no parallel-trends evidence, an instrument with a thin exclusion argument, a regression discontinuity with a manipulated running variable. AER referees are unforgiving on identification, and a coeditor who can see the gap in the introduction will not spend a referee slot on it.

When we pre-screen, we read the contribution sentence against the identification section and flag any case where the claim outruns the research design, because over-claiming is the fastest way to convert a promising paper into a desk rejection.

Padding the letter with referee suggestions AER never asked for. Because AER has no suggested-referee field, the letters that import a list of three to five suggested referees from another journal's template read as a process mismatch. The component this touches is coeditor routing: the author who lists referees instead of requesting the right coeditor by field signals they have not located their own contribution.

When we review, we replace any suggested-referee list with a single, field-matched coeditor request and a clean conflict disclosure, because that is the only routing lever AER actually offers.

These four are all fixable before submission, and they are exactly what an American Economic Review cover letter and fit check evaluates before you commit to the fee. The pattern that holds across all four: the AER coeditor is judging whether the contribution is broad enough for AER, identified cleanly enough to survive referees, and deposit-ready enough to clear the data policy, and no cover letter rescues a paper that fails those tests.

Picture the handling coeditor opening an AER submission. We read the cover letter first, but only for the disclosure items: which coeditor should handle this, is anyone conflicted, is there related or prior work, is the data deposit-ready, is it exclusive. Then we go straight to the abstract and introduction.

A letter that argues significance reads as noise during that scan, because the significance argument has to live where the identification and results can back it up. The submission that helps us most is the one whose letter is short, honest, and correctly routed, so we can spend our attention on whether the result is broad enough for the AER audience and whether the identification holds, rather than on untangling the submission package.

The hardest editorial judgment in an AER submission is not quality; it is breadth. AER, QJE, JPE, Econometrica, and the Review of Economic Studies are the top-5 general-interest outlets, and each selects differently. AER weighs cross-subfield interest most explicitly. QJE, edited at Harvard, carries a micro-theory heritage alongside strong empirical and theoretical macro. JPE, anchored at Chicago, selects for analytical and empirical work in the Chicago tradition.

Econometrica prizes the unification of theory with statistics and mathematics, and its own cover note is discouraged in favor of two co-editor suggestions, which is a different mechanic from AER's coeditor request. The Review of Economic Studies leans theoretical and applied and is known for backing younger economists. Below the top five, the AEJ field journals (Applied, Micro, Macro, Economic Policy) are the honest home for a contribution whose interest is primarily within one subfield.

The cover letter is a useful place to force this decision, because writing the contribution sentence makes you state out loud whether the result is broad-economics or field-economics. If the strongest version of that sentence still only speaks to specialists in your exact subfield, the honest target is an AEJ, and an American Economic Review manuscript fit check tests that breadth before you pay the AER fee.

If you cannot write the contribution sentence without it sounding forced, that is useful information. It usually means the result is field-economics rather than broad-economics, in which case AER:Insights (for a single clean finding) or an AEJ field journal is the more honest target. The cover letter is diagnostically useful precisely because it forces you to state whether the contribution is broad enough for the AER audience.

For target-fit before you write the letter, the American Economic Review submission guide covers the fee schedule and editorial culture; the Econometrica cover letter guide is the natural cross-check if your contribution is methodologically theoretical, and the economics and management journals hub maps the field's outlets if you are still deciding between the top five and the AEJ family.

How this page was created: this guide combines the AER submission guidelines, the AER editorial policy, the AEA Data and Code Availability Policy, the AER:Insights editorial policy, the AEA fee schedule, and Manusights pre-submission review patterns from economics manuscripts. We did not access a private AEA editorial account; the cover-letter guidance is built from public AEA materials and the editorial routing pattern we see across pre-submission reviews.

The named failure patterns above are drawn from our review data, not from any single submission, and no specific editor or referee is named because rosters rotate and per-submission attribution is not something this page can verify. Verify the current handling editors and the live fee schedule on the AEA's own pages before you submit.