The AEA Executive Committee voted to establish a new publication outlet for papers in economics using confidential data. The journal is provisionally named AEJ: Unverifiable. This is an attempt to be more transparent regarding which papers endorsed by the AEA can be reasonably reproduced by independent researchers and which cannot. The journal will consider papers in all fields of economics and carries the AEJ label (rather than an AER label) because it is intended to publish papers of comparable quality and importance to those found in the AER but does not deserve the same “stamp” because the reader has no way to verify the claims therein.
An important feature of the journal will be that disclosure of programs and data is NOT required. Instead, authors will be asked to “pinky swear” that they did not cheat, and that their research assistants were not berated into trying over and over to get results that matched the authors’ priors in exchange for favorable recommendations to graduate school. Referees will moreover be instructed to assume a willing suspension of disbelief; those requesting descriptive statistics related to the logging of categorical variables will be banned from ad-hoc duty for three years.
We understand that some authors will be reluctant to have the AEJ moniker rather than AER, just as submissions to the Papers & Proceedings have fallen off a cliff since we voted to rename them the AEA Papers & Proceedings. For those wishing to avoid such stigma, may we suggest submitting to Management Science, which not only allows the authors to indicate whether or not they wish to disclose their data but has no enforcement mechanism to ensure that those who promised to disclose actually do.