Quarterly Journal of Economics Response to Reviewers: How to Write the R&R That Gets Accepted (2026)
How to write a point-by-point response to reviewers for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, where the R&R is an editor-written road map, revisions go back to the most relevant referees, and the design bar matters more than another robustness table.
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Question | What to do |
|---|---|
Use this page for | Building a point-by-point response that is easy for reviewers and editors to trust. |
Start with | State the reviewer concern clearly, then pair each response with the exact evidence or revision. |
Common mistake | Sounding defensive or abstract instead of specific about what changed. |
Best next step | Turn the response into a visible checklist or matrix before you finalize the letter. |
Quick answer: A Quarterly Journal of Economics response to reviewers is an editor-led, point-by-point reply to an R&R that reads as a road map, so your letter should map change-for-change back to it. Open with a short summary-of-changes letter to the editors, answer each point under Editor, Referee 1, 2, and 3, give the exact page and line to cite the location of every change, and treat an identification concern as a design problem, not a robustness-table problem.
Start with the Quarterly Journal of Economics submission readiness check before you upload the revision, or work through this guide by hand. For broader cluster context, see the Quarterly Journal of Economics journal profile.
What does a Quarterly Journal of Economics response to reviewers require?
The Manusights QJE rebuttal scan. This guide tells you what the editors and the most-relevant subset of referees look for in a Quarterly Journal of Economics revise-and-resubmit response. Use this guide to pressure-test your point-by-point response before you submit the revision, then run the scan to check whether YOUR letter passes before you upload it to Editorialexpress editorial team page.
Our methodology for this guide: we reviewed QJE's own instructions to authors and data policy, the published QJE editorial-process descriptions, and the refereeing canon economists actually cite, then compared all of it against our own pre-submission reviews of QJE-targeted manuscripts; the sources used are listed at the end of this guide. We do not train AI on your manuscript and delete it within 24 hours.
Three things make a QJE response different from a generic rebuttal. First, it is editor-led: the QJE has a 5-editor team that reads each referee report as it arrives and writes the R&R as an explicit road map of which changes are required and which referee suggestions to follow, so your reply should track that road map line for line.
Second, revisions go back to the most relevant subset of referees for an up-or-down decision on the first revision, not an open-ended new round, so you get essentially one real shot. Third, the bar carried into revision is the identification and broad-interest bar that got you the R&R in the first place, which means a design concern needs a design answer, not another robustness table.
QJE is unusual among the top general-economics journals on the mechanics, too. There is no submission fee and no hard page or word limit, the abstract is capped at 250 words, and desk decisions arrive in roughly two weeks because the editors read submissions within about a day. About 62% of new submissions are desk-rejected; the rest go to referees, and only a small share of those are sent an R&R.
The hurdle for asking for a revision is high precisely because so few papers clear it, which is why a sloppy response wastes a rare opening.
Element | What QJE expects | What referees flag on the revision |
|---|---|---|
Opening | Summary-of-changes letter mapped to the editor's road map | Free-form letter that ignores the R&R structure |
Identification | A design change or a test that isolates the mechanism | More robustness tables that leave the design unchanged |
Specificity | Section and page number for every change in the revised paper | "We have revised the paper accordingly" with no location |
Tone | Substantive on the science, gracious on style | Defensive on every referee suggestion |
Consistency | One reconciled answer to a point raised by two referees | Two different numbers or justifications for the same point |
Replication | A complete QJE Dataverse package built during revision | A package promised for "after acceptance" |
Source: QJE instructions to authors, data policy, and published editorial-process descriptions, accessed June 2026.
How do I structure a point-by-point response for QJE?
State the exact section and page number for each revision in the revised paper, and reference the specific table, figure, or appendix you changed. Put this rule first because location-free replies are the most-cited rebuttal failure across economics R&Rs. Copy the skeleton below, then replace the bracketed text. Because the QJE R&R is a road map, your opener should be a short summary of changes that mirrors the editor's letter, followed by per-referee replies.
Dear Editors,
Thank you for the opportunity to revise our manuscript the manuscript title (QJE-[ID]). We are grateful to the editors and the three referees for a constructive set of reports. Following your road map, the revision makes three substantive changes: (1) we [strengthened the identification by adding the placebo / instrument-validity / event- study test]; (2) we [added the heterogeneity analysis] requested; and (3) we [posted the full replication package to the QJE Dataverse]. A point-by-point response follows.
Referee comments are in bold and our replies in plain text, with section and page numbers in the revised paper given for every change.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Response to the Editors
Editor comment E.1: "The contribution needs to be framed for the
general-interest reader."
Response: We agree. We have rewritten the introduction so the
identification result and its broad implication lead. See Section 1,
page 3, paragraphs 2 to 4.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Referee 1
Comment 1.1: "The parallel-trends assumption is not established."
Response: We have added the pre-trend event-study (new Table 3 and
Figure 2) and the placebo test the referee describes. The estimates
are flat before treatment. See Section 4.2, pages 14 to 16.
Comment 1.2: "The standard errors may understate clustering."
Response: We now cluster at the [state x year] level and report
wild-cluster-bootstrap p-values. Results are unchanged in sign and
significance. See Section 4.3, page 17, and Online Appendix B.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Referee 2
Comment 2.1: "The mechanism is asserted, not tested."
Response: We added the [mediation / decomposition] analysis that
isolates the channel (new Section 5, pages 19 to 22), rather than
adding further robustness checks to the reduced form.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Referee 3
Comment 3.1: "The data and code are not yet available."
Response: We have posted the data, programs, and a README sufficient
to permit replication to the QJE Dataverse [accession to follow at
acceptance]. See the Data Availability statement, page 31.
We believe the revised paper now addresses the road map and each
referee comment, and we look forward to your decision.
Sincerely,
[Corresponding author, on behalf of all authors]The skeleton carries the four tokens an economics referee scans for: a summary-of-changes letter to the editors, an Editor / Referee 1 / 2 / 3 structure, explicit action language ("we have added", "we now cluster", "we posted"), and a section and page reference for every change.
Reviewer-text vs author-response typography
Make the referee's words and your reply visually distinct. Put each referee comment in bold or a colored text box and keep your response in plain regular text directly beneath it. The QJE editors and the most-relevant subset of referees scan dozens of these letters; a response where comment and reply blur together costs you attention on the one revision round you get.
The distinction is not cosmetic, because the editor is checking your reply against a road map they wrote, and a clean two-font or two-color layout lets them confirm each item is closed in seconds rather than re-reading prose.
When should I comply and when should I push back?
The referees see your tone across every comment, and at revision the editors weigh whether your reply moved the science or just argued with it. A defensive reply to Referee 1 is visible to the editors and to whichever referees re-review. Calibrate.
Bad (defensive or vague) | Better (substantive and gracious) |
|---|---|
"The referee has misunderstood our identification." | "We did not explain the design clearly. We have rewritten Section 4.1, page 13, to make the identifying variation explicit." |
"This additional analysis is outside the scope of the paper." | "We agree this would strengthen the work. Because [data limitation], we instead added [alternative test] in Section 5, page 20, and flagged the open question in the Conclusion." |
"We have addressed this concern." | "We added the pre-trend event-study the referee requested (new Figure 2, Section 4.2, pages 14 to 16); pre-treatment estimates are flat." |
"The other referees did not raise this." | "We appreciate the point and added the specific change in Section 3, page 9, lines 4 to 11, to resolve it." |
"Our result is robust, as the tables show." | "We added the test the referee asked for to change the design, not just the reduced form; the channel is now isolated in Section 5, page 21 (coefficient and confidence interval reported)." |
The pattern that works at QJE: concede where the referee is right, change the design or run the test rather than piling on robustness, point to the exact section and page, and push back only when a request is genuinely infeasible, with a reason and an alternative.
The QJE reviewer culture you are writing into
The Quarterly Journal of Economics is editor-led in a specific, documented way. A 5-editor team reads each referee report as it arrives rather than waiting for the full set, and the revise-and-resubmit letter is written as a road map that tells you which changes are required and which referee suggestions to follow. That changes how you write: your response should map change-for-change back to the editor's road map, treating the editor letter as the table of contents and the referee replies as the detail.
External review uses roughly three referees, and on revision the paper is sent back to the most relevant subset of referees for an up-or-down decision on the first revision. There is rarely an open-ended second exploratory round. After a positive first-revision decision, the paper moves to conditional acceptance, where remaining rounds are minor but essential revisions for readability and final preparation. The practical consequence: the first revision is the real one.
SciRev community reports (a small, directional sample) put the first review round near 1.8 months and around 3.5 reports per submission, which sets a rough planning clock, not a guarantee.
The contribution bar that earned the R&R is carried into the revision. QJE publishes broad-interest economics with credible identification, and the editors only ask for revisions on a small share of refereed papers, so the revision is evaluated against the same high hurdle. A revision that adds volume without resolving the core identification or contribution concern reads as effort, not progress.
How this compares to the rest of the field matters for calibration. At the American Economic Review and Econometrica the referee-driven culture and the formal-theory bar shape the revision differently; at the Journal of Finance the 60-page rule and submission-fee economics change the incentives; at the field journals the design bar is lower.
QJE sits at the general-interest top: a road-map R&R, an up-or-down first-revision decision, and a design bar that does not yield to another robustness table. Because the decision turns on whether you moved the design, the QJE revision is closer to a second referee exam than a wording pass.
Key Insight
A QJE revise-and-resubmit is an editor-written road map evaluated in a single up-or-down first-revision decision. Write your response as a change-for-change map back to that road map, and answer design concerns by changing the design, not by adding robustness tables.
What our QJE rebuttal reviews surface
In our pre-submission review work with Quarterly Journal of Economics manuscripts, the revisions that stall or get rejected on the first-revision decision share a small set of recurring weaknesses. Each maps to a specific, named failure pattern in the QJE editorial culture, and each is testable against your own draft response before you upload it.
Robustness tables answering an identification concern. The most common and most expensive pattern in our QJE pre-submission reviews is a response that answers a question about research design with a wall of new robustness tables that leave the design unchanged.
When a referee questions whether the parallel-trends or exclusion-restriction assumption holds, adding ten more specifications to the same reduced form does not move the up-or-down decision; adding the pre-trend event-study, the placebo, or the test that isolates the mechanism does. Across our QJE rebuttal reviews, this mismatch between a design question and a robustness answer is the single strongest predictor of a rejected revision.
Conceding in the letter but not in the paper. A response that writes "we agree and have softened this claim" while the abstract and introduction still carry the original overclaim reads as evasive the moment a referee opens the revised paper. In our pre-submission review work with QJE manuscripts, we routinely find a concession in the response letter that is not reflected in the results or conclusion text.
Every concession in the letter must be matched by an edit at the named section and page, or the referee treats the concession as cosmetic.
An incomplete QJE Dataverse replication package. QJE enforces a data-and-code policy at acceptance: data, programs, and a README sufficient to permit replication go to the QJE Dataverse on Harvard Dataverse before publication. In our QJE pre-submission reviews, responses that defer the package to "after acceptance" or post code that does not run end-to-end draw a re-review comment and delay the conditional-acceptance step.
Build the replication package while you revise, test that it runs from raw data to final tables on a clean machine, and note any proprietary data in the cover letter so the editors can apply the exemption process.
Inconsistent answers across referees. Because the editors read the reports together and the revision goes back to the most relevant subset, a response that frames the same sample or statistical point one way for Referee 1 and another way for Referee 3 reads as evasive. In our QJE pre-submission reviews we find the same standard-error or clustering concern raised by two referees and answered with two different justifications. Reconcile every overlapping comment to a single, consistent answer before submission.
Change the design, document the location, build the replication package, and reconcile across referees. That four-part discipline is what separates a QJE revision that clears the up-or-down decision from one that is rejected. Check your QJE point-by-point response for these patterns before you submit.
A QJE comply-or-push-back decision table
Situation | Recommended approach at QJE |
|---|---|
Referee questions identification or parallel trends | Comply with a design answer. Add the event-study, placebo, or instrument-validity test; cite the section and page. |
Referee asks for an analysis that needs unavailable data | Push back with the data limitation, add the best feasible alternative, and flag the open question in the Conclusion. |
Referee flags clustering or inference | Comply. Re-cluster correctly, report wild-cluster-bootstrap p-values, and show the result is unchanged. |
Referee says the contribution is too narrow for QJE | Reframe the introduction for the general-interest reader; this is the broad-interest bar, not a cosmetic fix. |
Editor road map lists a required change you dispute | Engage substantively with evidence; the road map is the up-or-down checklist, so a flat refusal is high-risk. |
Referee asks for the replication package | Comply now. Build and test the QJE Dataverse package during revision, not after acceptance. |
Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of QJE-targeted resubmissions, 2025 cohort.
How much work a QJE revision actually takes
Authors consistently underestimate the design-change effort and overestimate the writing effort. This breakdown is about workload, not the journal's decision clock; for the end-to-end schedule, see the Quarterly Journal of Economics submission guide.
Revision task | Where the effort goes | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
Re-reading the editor road map and reports | Finding the one core concern behind the comments | A day of careful reading, not a skim |
Changing the design or isolating the mechanism | The actual bar for a QJE revision | The bulk of the work, often several weeks |
Building and testing the QJE Dataverse package | A README and code that run end-to-end from raw data | Days, and skipped most often until it bites |
Writing the point-by-point replies | One reply plus a section and page reference per comment | Less than authors fear once the analysis exists |
Reconciling overlapping comments | One consistent answer for every referee who raised a point | Skipped most often, and it shows |
Source: Manusights pre-submission reviews of QJE resubmissions, 2025 cohort, last updated June 6, 2026.
Think twice if: the rejection-on-revision risks are real
A revise-and-resubmit at QJE is not a soft acceptance. The revised paper and your point-by-point response go back to the most relevant subset of referees for an up-or-down decision, and the revision can still end in rejection if it does not resolve the core concern. With overall acceptance around 3% and about 62% of submissions desk-rejected before they ever reach referees, the journal does not rubber-stamp revisions.
Most rejected revisions trace to one cause: the author answered an identification or design question with robustness tables that did not change the design. The second most common is a concession made in the letter but never reflected in the paper.
Think twice before you upload if any of these are true. The response uses generic "we have revised accordingly" language with no section or page numbers. A referee questioned the design and you answered with more specifications on the same reduced form. The same clustering or sample concern from two referees got two different answers. The replication package is promised for "after acceptance" rather than built and tested now. Fixing these before resubmission is what keeps the up-or-down decision from going down.
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Red flag patterns a QJE referee spots in seconds
Before you upload, scan your own response for the patterns that draw an immediate re-review comment. Each is a specific, checkable thing in your draft, not a vague quality dimension.
- A reply with no location. Any "we have revised the paper" with no section and page number reads as evasion the moment a referee cannot find the change.
- Robustness where a design change was requested. A referee questioned identification and the reply only adds specifications to the same reduced form.
This is the single most common cause of a rejected revision at QJE.
- A concession the paper does not reflect. "We agree and have softened this" while the abstract still overclaims signals the letter and the paper disagree.
- Two answers to one shared point. The same clustering or sample concern raised by two referees, answered two different ways, signals you did not reconcile the reports.
- A replication package deferred. "Code will be posted after acceptance" reads as a package that does not yet run.
How does this guide go beyond the QJE author instructions?
The official instructions tell you to submit through Editorial Express, cap the abstract at 250 words, and post replication materials to the QJE Dataverse at acceptance.
They do not tell you that the R&R is an editor-written road map, that the revision goes back to the most relevant subset of referees for an up-or-down decision, that a design concern needs a design answer rather than more robustness, or that the conditional-acceptance step is light by comparison. Those facts change how you write every reply.
The named failure patterns above come from our pre-submission reviews of QJE-targeted manuscripts, and they are testable against your own draft today, not theoretical concerns. The refereeing canon economists cite is consistent with this: Berk, Harvey, and Hirshleifer argue that much revision effort is wasted on additions that do not change the decision, which is exactly the robustness-instead-of-design trap.
- Manusights pre-submission reviews of Quarterly Journal of Economics-targeted manuscripts (2025 cohort)
Frequently asked questions
Open with a short summary-of-changes letter to the editors, because a QJE revise-and-resubmit is an editor-written road map and your letter should map directly back to it. Then answer each point in order under Editor, Referee 1, Referee 2, and Referee 3, quote the comment in full, state the exact change, and give the section and page number in the revised paper. Keep referee text and your reply in two visually distinct fonts or colors so the editor and the most-relevant subset of referees can scan it fast.
It depends on what the referee questioned. If the concern is about identification or research design, more robustness tables that leave the design unchanged will not move the decision; you usually need to change the design, add the test that isolates the mechanism, or show why the existing design already identifies the effect. The QJE hurdle for asking for a revision is high, so the editors expect a serious attempt at the core concern, not cosmetic additions.
Often two substantive rounds plus a light conditional-acceptance pass. Editors typically send a first revision back to the most relevant subset of referees and then make an up-or-down decision. Most papers that get an R&R and respond seriously are ultimately accepted, after which further rounds are minor but essential revisions for readability and final preparation.
Yes. An R&R is not an acceptance. The revised paper and your point-by-point response go back to referees for an up-or-down decision, and a revision can be rejected if it does not resolve the core identification or contribution concern. The most common cause is answering a design question with robustness checks that do not change the design.
QJE enforces a data-and-code policy: accepted empirical, simulation, or experimental papers must post the data, programs, and a description sufficient to permit replication to the QJE Dataverse on Harvard Dataverse before publication. Build the replication package while you revise, not after acceptance, and notify the editors in your cover letter if any data are proprietary or restricted so they can apply the exemption process.
Sources
- Data Policy, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford Academic (accessed June 2026)
- Instructions to Authors, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford Academic (accessed June 2026)
- E-submit submission portal, Quarterly Journal of Economics (Editorial Express) (accessed June 2026)
- Q&A on the QJE editorial process, World Bank Development Impact (accessed June 2026, process facts only)
- Berk, Harvey, and Hirshleifer, "How to Write an Effective Referee Report," Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(1) (DOI 10.1257/jep.31.1.231, accessed June 2026)
- Hamermesh, "Facts and Myths about Refereeing," Journal of Economic Perspectives 8(1) (DOI 10.1257/jep.8.1.153, accessed June 2026)
- Noble, "Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Response to Reviewers," PLOS Computational Biology (DOI 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005730, accessed June 2026)
- Reviews for the Quarterly Journal of Economics, SciRev (accessed June 2026, small-N community sample)
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