Rejected from Review of Economics and Statistics? Where to Submit Next

This guide was checked on July 17, 2026 against MIT Press fee guidance, the REStat Editorial Express submission portal, the current Manusights REStat guide, and adjacent economics rejection-routing pages.

Source-supported facts used here:

• MIT Press lists Review of Economics and Statistics as founded in 1917, with print ISSN 0034-6535 and online ISSN 1530-9142.
• MIT Press says there is a nonrefundable submission fee for authors who are not subscribers, and that the fee is waived when one author has a current-year individual subscription to the Review.
• The MIT Press fee page checked July 17, 2026 listed the Review of Economics and Statistics submission fee as USD 125.
• MIT Press tells authors using proprietary data not to pay the submission fee until the editorial office confirms that the data comply with the journal's Data Availability Policy.
• Editorial Express allows authors to upload a manuscript, cover letter, and other files or supporting documentation for submission or resubmission to Review of Economics and Statistics.
• Editorial Express states that manuscripts must be uploaded in PDF format only.

Facts intentionally avoided or caveated:

• No current REStat acceptance rate, impact factor, exact review-time median, or appeal-success rate is stated as an official live fact here.
• No individual editor names are quoted.
• Existing Manusights economics pages were used for contradiction checks and internal routing, not as source of truth for volatile facts.
• 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 We did not use private acceptance-rate data, unpublished editor communications, or live search-position claims.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: REStat's applied-economics position makes it a strong home for credible empirical work, but that same position makes weak identification, unclear data access, and field-scope drift expensive.

The proprietary-data warning matters after rejection because it is one of the few official REStat signals that affects a decision before the next upload. MIT Press tells proprietary-data authors: "do not pay the submission fee" until the editorial office confirms policy compliance. Treat that as a readiness check, not a payment footnote.

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

The central question is whether REStat rejected the journal-reader fit or the empirical credibility package. A fit rejection can route quickly. A credibility rejection follows the manuscript.

Do not treat this as a prestige ladder. Treat it as reader selection. The best next journal is the one whose referee can see the contribution without asking why the paper was not written for another field.

Recent REStat records on MIT Press show the breadth that a rejected manuscript is competing against: information-provision experiments (10.1162/REST.a.1745), social-insurance enrollment in Thailand (10.1162/REST.a.1711), and measurement error in quantitative trade counterfactuals (10.1162/REST.a.1785). Those examples are not a template for your paper, but they show the range: credible empirical design, policy-relevant applied economics, and econometric tools can all fit when the paper's reader is clear.

After rejection, compare your manuscript against that mix. If your strongest contribution is the research design, AEJ: Applied or a field journal may be cleaner. If the method or inference tool is the center, Journal of Applied Econometrics may be cleaner. If the policy domain is the center, public, labor, health, development, or trade journals may read the paper faster and better.

Rebuild before another submission if the rejection touched any of these areas:

• the abstract makes a causal claim that the design does not support;
• the first table is descriptive when the paper needs an identified effect;
• the identifying variation is plausible only after a long verbal explanation;
• clustering, serial correlation, multiple testing, or pre-trend evidence is underdefended;
• proprietary data, code, or replication materials are not ready for the next journal's policy;
• the economics contribution is buried behind institutional detail;
• the cover letter says "applied economics" but the paper reads as labor, public, health, development, finance, or econometrics.

Retarget quickly only when the editor's signal was mainly journal fit and the evidence package is already strong.

In our pre-submission review work with Review of Economics and Statistics submissions, the recurring problem is not that authors choose weak topics. It is that the empirical package and the venue promise do not match.

Four failure patterns decide the next route.

The credible design is not visible early enough. The paper may have a good instrument, discontinuity, panel design, policy variation, or model-based identification, but the abstract and first two pages make readers hunt for it. At REStat, an applied-economics editor should not have to wait until page twelve to understand why the estimate is credible.

The data construction is doing hidden work. Applied economics papers often depend on linked administrative data, proprietary firm records, confidential microdata, scraped datasets, or complex sample restrictions. If the key result depends on a construction choice that is not transparent, the next journal will ask the same question. The MIT Press proprietary-data warning is a practical signal: data access and policy compliance need to be handled before payment and submission, not after acceptance.

The paper is really a field-journal paper. Many REStat rejects are publishable economics papers with the wrong first reader. A labor paper should not pretend to be broad applied economics if its real contribution is a labor-market mechanism. A public-finance paper should not hide the policy margin. A development paper should not mute the setting that field referees would value.

The robustness appendix is defensive rather than diagnostic. Long robustness tables do not fix a weak identification story. They help only when they test the exact threats a skeptical applied-economics referee would name: selection, pre-trends, spillovers, alternative controls, bandwidth, clustering, measurement, attrition, or omitted mechanisms.

The strongest post-REStat repair is usually not a new cover letter. It is a rebuilt front end: abstract, introduction, first table, identification paragraph, data note, and routing logic all saying the same thing.