Susan Athey Interview

Richmond Fed interviews John Bates Clark Award Winner, Susan Athey, and it's online. This is a nice interview. She sounds like a deeply intelligent person. I want to say that she was the first female John Bates Clark award winner (given every two years to the most important economist under 40, and highly correlated with future Nobel Prize winners), but don't quote me on that. What's interesting is that her explanations of her theoretical work is very readable, and sounds very important and interesting, but very intimidating too. One highlight in the interview is here, though.

RF: You are the co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, one of four new journals launched by the American Economic Association. What niche do you aim to fill that is not currently served by the many and varied academic journals already in existence?

Athey: There are a lot of journals, but there are not a lot of really good journals. Most of them are fairly secure in their position. So there is not a lot of competition on service. An enormous amount of time is wasted with slow refereeing processes and revisions that may improve the paper but are not worth the time required to make them. So a big goal for me is to have an outlet for the kind of work that I like, where people can get good service in a general-interest outlet. A secondary issue is that for more technical work there are not that many options from a general-interest perspective. Your papers fall to the field journals very quickly. Basically, what I want is a journal that gets the cost-benefit analysis on revisions right, that turns around papers fast, and that reaches a broad audience with technically rigorous work.

Man, I hope she can do something about this. The turnaround on papers for good journals is obscene. My colleague in an email told me he had a paper under review at one journal for 23 months before getting a rejection letter with one lame and worthless referee report. It's now at another journal and has been there fore 13 months, and still nothing. I really don't know anyone in any other field that has problems like we have on publishing. In the sciences, it seems like things get sent, accepted, and published within about 3 months. In economics, the mode is probably more like 9-12 months, just to get a revise and resubmit.