Rejected from the American Economic Review? The Best Journals to Submit Next

The right target after the AER depends on whether the paper is broad economics that needed a different general home, a short single-idea result, a field-deep empirical contribution, or a theory or policy paper. Selectivity is high across all of these; the real differences are editorial taste, format, submission cost, and whether the AEA transfer carries your referee reports for free.

Source: AER submission guidelines, AEA transfer-option FAQ, AER: Insights guidelines, JPE instructions for authors, accessed June 2026. AEJ transfer rejection rates are AEA-reported figures; non-AEA selectivity and timing should be checked on the receiving journal's current author page before submission.

1. AER: Insights

If your AER rejection turned on length, padding, or a contribution that is real but does not need a full-length treatment, AER: Insights is the most natural in-house move. It publishes work of equivalent quality to the flagship, but the format is strict: manuscripts without exhibits may not exceed 7,000 words, each exhibit costs 200 words off that budget, and you get at most five figures or tables, one page each.

Editor Amy Finkelstein's bar is simple: a great short paper makes one point and makes it clearly. If your AER paper spent five pages building up to a single clean result, Insights may be the right format and the drop-down carries your reports.

Best for: a single-idea paper of AER quality that does not need an extended introduction or a long appendix.

2. AEJ: Applied Economics

When the AER's signal is that the empirical result is strong but the general-interest case did not clear the flagship bar, AEJ: Applied is the most common transfer home. It is built for empirical applied microeconomics: labor, development, health, education, demography, empirical corporate finance, and empirical trade.

Its referees engage the field contribution directly rather than asking whether the whole discipline will care. Be realistic about the odds: roughly 85 percent of papers arriving on the transfer option are rejected, so the drop-down lowers the cost of resubmitting, not the bar.

Best for: a careful empirical microeconomics paper whose contribution is field-deep rather than cross-subfield.

3. AEJ: Macroeconomics

AEJ: Macro is the right transfer when the paper is fundamentally about aggregate fluctuations, growth, or the role of policy in that context. It draws on and feeds back into monetary theory, finance, labor, and development, so a macro paper that the AER read as too specialized for the general audience often lands well here.

Of the four AEJs, it has the most forgiving transfer odds at roughly 75 percent rejected, though that is still a selective field flagship, not a soft landing.

Best for: macro and growth papers, including monetary, fiscal, and quantitative-macro work, that needed a specialist macro audience.

4. AEJ: Microeconomics

AEJ: Micro is the home for microeconomic theory, industrial organization, and the micro side of trade, political economy, and finance. It publishes theory as well as empirical and experimental work that sits inside a theoretical framework. If your AER rejection turned on the audience being too narrow for a primarily theoretical contribution, the same paper is often a strong fit here, where referees value the theoretical move on its own terms.

Best for: theory, industrial organization, and experimental-with-theory papers that needed a specialist theory audience.

5. AEJ: Economic Policy

AEJ: Policy ties everything to the role of economic policy in outcomes: public economics, urban and regional, the policy side of health, education, and welfare, law and economics, regulation, and environmental and natural-resource economics.

When the AER coeditor liked the policy question but judged the breadth insufficient for the flagship, this is the better-fit AEJ. Like Micro, its transfer rejection rate is roughly 80 percent.

Best for: policy-evaluation and public-economics papers whose contribution is the policy outcome rather than a cross-subfield methodological advance.

6. Quarterly Journal of Economics

If you want to test another general-interest flagship rather than step into the AEA field portfolio, the QJE is the closest lateral. Both want broad economics, but the emphasis differs: the QJE rewards a memorable central finding carried by an identification strategy that does the heavy lifting, while the AER is comfortable with a wider range of styles.

A paper the AER read as well-executed but not broad enough may read differently to QJE editors if the central result is striking. Check the current QJE instructions before submission, then see rejected from the Quarterly Journal of Economics: where next for the QJE-side cascade.

Best for: broad papers with a memorable headline result that want a second general-flagship reading without entering the AEJ portfolio.

7. Journal of Political Economy

JPE carries the Chicago tradition: theory and applied work integrated tightly, with price theory and structural reasoning valued. If the AER found your contribution sound but not striking enough for its taste, JPE may read the same paper as a strong economics contribution built on a clean mechanism.

Be honest about the cost and time: check the current JPE instructions before submission, and submit only when the fit is real. The Review of Economic Studies is the European-tradition equivalent for technically demanding theory-empirics work.

Best for: theory-meets-applied papers where the economic mechanism, not a surprising headline, is the contribution.

The AER is unusual in top economics because it sits at the top of a real portfolio transfer pipeline. The AEA runs an in-portfolio drop-down transfer: a rejecting AER or AER: Insights coeditor can route your paper to any of the four AEJ field journals, and the editorial office forwards the AER decision letter, the referee reports, and, with referee permission, the cover letter and referee identities to the receiving AEJ editor.

You can accept the suggested destination, choose a different AEJ, or decline and submit elsewhere manually. A transfer offer is a routing suggestion, not a quality endorsement, and the next-tier bar is still high, so treat the destination like any other target.

What the transfer does not do is lower the rejection rate. The AEA's own figures show roughly 85 percent of transferred papers rejected at AEJ: Applied, 80 percent at AEJ: Micro and AEJ: Policy, and 75 percent at AEJ: Macro.

The value is in carrying your reports forward, not in an easier verdict. That is why the order in which you climb the ladder matters: take the drop-down only when the suggested field journal genuinely fits.

A realistic ladder for an AER-quality paper looks like this:

• In-portfolio first tier: AER: Insights if the paper makes one clean point and fits the 7,000-word, five-exhibit format; otherwise the AEJ that matches your subfield (Applied for empirical micro, Macro for aggregate work, Micro for theory and industrial organization, Policy for policy-outcome work).

The drop-down carries your reports, which is the cheapest rung on the ladder.

• Lateral general-flagship tier: the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, or the Review of Economic Studies, if the paper is genuinely broad and you want another general-interest reading.

Each is a fresh submission with its own fee and clock; there is no transfer pipeline between the separate top-5 societies.

• Specialist field tier: the top journal in your subfield (the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of International Economics), where specialist referees value the work the generalist office could not place.

If the AER desk-rejected fast (an administrative or coeditor desk decision in the first one to two weeks), that is almost always a general-interest or fit signal, so take the in-portfolio drop-down to the matching AEJ or move laterally now. If referees raised substantive concerns, fix them first; the same gaps will surface at the next journal, and because the economics referee pool for a given topic is small, you may draw the same reviewers.

In our pre-submission review work with American Economic Review submissions, four named rejection patterns generate the most consistent rejections, and each one points to a different next step. Each maps to the AER's editorial culture of demanding a contribution that interests economists across subfields, screened at a fast desk pace by a handling coeditor.

SciRev community reports describe very fast desk decisions for some AER submissions, which matches the fast-no cadence the patterns below describe. Knowing which one applies to your paper is the difference between a productive transfer and a second rejection from the same root cause.

The general-interest case is buried below the abstract. The AER's bar is a contribution that matters to economists beyond your immediate subfield, and a short abstract plus the first two pages of the introduction are where that case has to be made. Across our AER pre-submission reviews, the single most common pattern is a strong paper whose abstract and introduction spend their words compressing field context instead of stating why the result matters more broadly.

When that is the issue, the paper is usually fine on substance, and the fix is to rewrite the abstract and the opening so a labor, macro, public, or development economist can see the stakes. A QJE lateral or an AEJ transfer often works once the framing is repaired.

The contribution is field-deep without cross-subfield consequence. A second pattern appears when the data, model, or identification design is serious but the manuscript reads like a top field-journal paper. We repeatedly see AER submissions where the introduction frames the result as valuable mainly to one subfield, which is exactly what a generalist coeditor needs a reason to override.

This is a fit problem, not a substance problem, and it is the canonical case for the in-portfolio drop-down: AEJ: Applied for empirical micro, AEJ: Macro for aggregate work, AEJ: Micro for theory, AEJ: Policy for policy-outcome papers. Moving the same paper to another general flagship without surfacing the broader consequence simply moves the same objection.

The paper is overweight: too long, too many appendices for its core idea.

The AER recommends manuscripts stay within 40 pages at 11-point, 1.5 spacing, with the average published article around 35 to 36 typeset pages, and its guidance explicitly flags excessive reliance on online appendices. In the manuscripts we review, a recurring root cause is a single clean result wrapped in a full-length treatment.

When the central contribution is one point but the paper carries the apparatus of a much larger one, AER: Insights is often the cleaner shape. The 7,000-word, five-exhibit format forces the paper to be what it actually is, and the drop-down carries your reports.

The identification or robustness package is not airtight before review.

For empirical submissions, AER referees and the coeditor expect the identification argument, robustness checks, sample construction, and the AEA-style replication package to hold up before review, not to be promised in a revision.

We see papers where the headline result is convincing but the identifying assumption is asserted in one sentence, the alternative specifications are thin, or the effect-size reporting is incomplete. That is a substance gap every top-5 journal and every AEJ will flag. Strengthen the identification section, the robustness appendix, and the data-and-code plan before you resubmit or transfer.

Across these patterns, the operative distinction is fit versus substance. A fit rejection means the work is sound but framed for the wrong audience or the wrong format, and you take the drop-down, move laterally, or reformat for Insights. A substance rejection in the identification, robustness, or evidentiary altitude means the next journal will reject for the same reason unless you do the work first.

Don't just resubmit the paper down the ladder. The most expensive mistake after an AER rejection is treating every rejection as a fit problem and resubmitting unchanged when the paper needs real work.

If referees raised concerns about your identification strategy, your robustness package, or your general-interest framing, the next set of referees will see the same gaps again. Because the economics referee pool for a given topic is small, you may draw the same reviewers, including through the AEJ transfer, where your AER reports travel with the paper.

Be honest about which rejection you got. An administrative or fast coeditor desk rejection is usually a general-interest, fit, or format signal: the editor judged the contribution not broad enough or the paper not shaped for the flagship, and the paper itself may be fine to move now.

A post-review rejection with substantive referee reports is a different message. Those reports are the most valuable feedback your paper will get for free, and ignoring them to chase a faster transfer wastes them. Read them as a roadmap, not a verdict, and carry the revised analysis into the transfer.

An appeal is rarely the answer. At top economics journals, appeals succeed only when you can show the handling coeditor misread a central result, and a general-interest desk rejection is almost never reversible. Because the AER refunds 50 percent of the submission fee on a desk rejection and the in-portfolio drop-down gives you a clean, report-carrying step to a field journal, your time is better spent reframing the abstract and choosing the right next venue than contesting this one.