Rejected from Review of Economic Studies? Where to Submit Next

This guide was checked on July 17, 2026 against current ReStud submissions, Editorial Express, editorial-board, Oxford Academic author-instructions, and ReStud home/news pages.

Source-supported facts used here:

• ReStud says it receives more than 1,700 new submissions per year.
• With effect from June 1, 2026, the submission fee is USD 250 for new submissions, with a USD 150 reduced fee if every author meets the stated student, recent-PhD, or low/middle-income economy condition.
• ReStud states that payment of the submission fee does not guarantee full review. Editors first decide whether a manuscript is appropriate for the journal and has a high enough chance of favorable review to justify referee time.
• ReStud uses Editorial Express at editorialexpress.com/restud for new and revised manuscripts.
• The journal applies strict conflict-of-interest rules for assignment to managing editors.
• Accepted papers must submit code and data needed to reproduce the work, and authors are advised to consult the Data and Code Availability Policy before first submission.
• ReStud submissions should be under 45 pages including title page, tables, figures, references, and appendices. Online appendices should not exceed 30 pages and should contain additional rather than central material.
• The abstract should be no more than 150 words.
• Authors are not allowed to submit revisions of previously rejected manuscripts unless explicitly invited to resubmit by an editor.
• ReStud's home page says it now receives nearly 2,000 submissions per year, of which half go through full refereeing, and it announced Review of Economic Studies: Insights in July 2026 as a new open-access journal in the ReStud family.

Facts intentionally avoided or caveated:

• Method note: this page uses public official-source facts plus Manusights review-pattern analysis. We did not use private acceptance-rate data, unpublished editor communications, or live search-position claims.
• Strengths and weaknesses are separated deliberately: ReStud's official constraints make resubmission boundaries unusually clear, but the page cannot tell you whether your specific referee reports are fatal without reading the manuscript.
• No current acceptance rate, impact factor, appeal success rate, or exact rejection probability appears as a live fact on this page.
• Existing Manusights economics pages were used for sibling contradiction checks and internal routing, not as source of truth for volatile facts.

ReStud rejection signals are useful only if you translate them into a next-journal route.

The central question is whether ReStud rejected the top-five economics owner or the evidence package. A fit rejection can route quickly. An evidence-package rejection usually follows the paper.

Do not treat this as a prestige ladder. A ReStud rejection can mean the paper is wrong for the journal, but it can also mean the manuscript needs a clearer model-to-evidence bridge, better identification defense, a tighter 45-page main text, or a field-journal reader.

Rebuilding for ReStud is plausible only if the editor explicitly invited resubmission or the paper will later return as a genuinely new submission with a materially different scientific contract. Ordinary rejected-paper revisions should not be resubmitted to ReStud.

Good reasons to rebuild the paper before retargeting:

• The paper still has a top-five economics contribution, but the abstract and first pages did not make the theory-empirics link visible.
• The model, identification, or robustness package can be repaired with existing work.
• The 45-page structure can be made self-contained, with central proofs, mechanisms, tables, or identification logic in the main text.
• The data/code package can be made reproducible before the next editor sees it.

Bad reasons to rebuild for ReStud specifically:

• You only want another chance at the same journal after an ordinary rejection.
• The paper is a strong field contribution but not a top-five general economics paper.
• The editor's signal was that referee time would not be well spent on this manuscript.
• The missing work requires a new model, new identification strategy, new data construction, or major robustness rebuild you cannot complete now.

If you rebuild, make the correction visible early. The 150-word abstract, introduction, first table or figure, model setup, empirical design, data/code note, limitations, and cover letter should all state the same economics contribution.

In our pre-submission review work on Review of Economic Studies submissions, the strongest predictor is whether the manuscript has a stable top-five economics owner from the abstract to the appendix. Manusights internal analysis treats this as a specific rejection pattern: the abstract, model, identification section, tables, robustness, data/code plan, and cover letter must all explain why the paper belongs in a general economics journal rather than a field journal.

We see the same failure in two forms. Sometimes the paper is genuinely broad but hides its economic mechanism until the middle of the introduction. Sometimes the paper is excellent field work, but the general-economics claim is pasted onto a manuscript whose evidence, tables, and appendix still speak only to the field audience. Those are different weaknesses and need different next journals.

Four specific failure patterns decide the next route.

ReStud theory-empirics split. The introduction promises a theory-empirics contribution, but the model and empirical design do not discipline each other. The repair is to make the model explain what the empirical section tests, or to retarget the paper to the field journal that owns the empirical question.

ReStud appendix-dependent contribution. The main text gestures at the core mechanism while the proof, identification argument, or central robustness table sits in an online appendix. ReStud's own instructions say the main paper should be self-contained and that key results or at least a sketch of the argument should be in the main paper. If the editor cannot see the contribution in the main text, the next journal will struggle too.

ReStud data/code credibility gap. The manuscript's result depends on sample construction, code, proprietary data, simulations, or nonstandard cleaning decisions, but the data/code plan reads like an acceptance-stage chore. ReStud tells authors to consult the policy before first submission and warns that noncompliance can delay or prevent publication. Treat reproducibility as a pre-submission fit signal.

ReStud field-journal masquerade. The paper is strong within labor, public, development, IO, finance, monetary, macro, theory, or econometrics, but the abstract never states why economists outside that field should update. If the general-economics case is real, rewrite it. If it is not, AEJ, JEEA, or the field journal is the cleaner next target.

The highest-risk rejected ReStud packages fail before the final robustness table is debated: the abstract promises broad economics, the model solves a narrower problem, the empirical design supports one field-specific interpretation, and the appendix carries the claim that should have been in the paper.

Before resubmission elsewhere, we check whether the abstract, first two pages, model, identification section, tables, robustness checks, data/code note, and cover letter all make the same promise. If they do not, the next editor will see a manuscript still carrying its ReStud rejection.