jape-review-process

Review Process at JAE (jape-review-process)

When to trigger

• Setting expectations for how a JAE submission will be evaluated
• Understanding who decides and what referees focus on
• Planning a pipeline around JAE's submission and resubmission rules

How JAE review works

• Single-blind peer review. Official text: manuscripts are "single-blind peer reviewed by anonymous reviewers in addition to the Editor." Reviewers are anonymous; authors are not — do not anonymize the manuscript the way a double-blind journal would.
• Editor-in-Chief decides. Final acceptance or rejection rests with the Editor-in-Chief (Barbara Rossi). Co-editors handle many papers, but the final call is the EiC's. (The full current co-editor roster is 待核实 against a live board page.)
• Rejected papers are not resubmittable unless the Editor invites it. Treat a rejection as final absent an explicit invitation.
• Cap: no more than three papers from the same author may be under review at once — stagger submissions.

What applied-econometrics referees check

Because JAE is empirical and replicable, expect reviewers to probe whether the estimand is identified on your real data; whether the method is useful in that setting; whether inference is appropriate (HAC, clustered, weak-IV-robust); whether robustness is shown (in the unlimited online appendix); and whether the work is reproducible, consistent with the mandatory Data Archive deposit. Treat replication objections as central, not administrative; a clean package pre-empts many. Do not infer process details beyond what the source map verifies.

Desk-screen failure patterns at JAE

Most early exits at this venue trace to scope and replicability, not polish. Audit against the recurring patterns:

Pattern	Why JAE screens it out	Pre-submission fix
Pure-theory paper (asymptotics, no real data)	Outside the applied mandate	Add a genuine application or reroute to a theory outlet
Simulation-only evidence	The venue wants the method on real data	Anchor the Monte Carlo to an empirical question and dataset
Data that can be neither deposited nor documented	Mandatory archive deposit is unworkable	Resolve access/description before submitting
Main text far over 35 pages	Limit is hard; appendix is the designed overflow	Move robustness grids out of the article
Summary >100 words or carrying citations	House front-matter rule	Rewrite per jape-writing-style

Decision vocabulary and what each letter implies

• Reject — final; the no-resubmission-unless-invited rule means a reworked version goes elsewhere, not back to JAE.
• Reject with invitation to resubmit / major revision — the Editor sees a path; the resubmission is judged on whether each referee objection got evidence, not prose.
• Minor revision — protect the archive: any number that changes must change in the deposited code too.
• Exact decision categories and turnaround times vary; confirm against the journal's current author guidelines rather than assuming figures.

Planning the pipeline without invented statistics

Do not budget around rumored acceptance rates or review speeds — JAE does not owe you a number, and this skill will not fabricate one. Plan around the verifiable constraints instead: the three-papers-under-review cap forces staggering across coauthor teams; the single-blind model means your identity and prior work are visible context, so the paper must be consistent with your own archived past results; and the EiC's final authority means the response letter's executive summary should be written for the Editor, with referee-level detail beneath it. What is predictable is content: an applied-econometrics referee pool drawn from people who write HAC, bootstrap, and weak-IV papers themselves will test exactly those joints first.

Output format

【Model】single-blind; reviewers anonymous, authors not — prepared? [Y/N]
【Authority】final decision = Editor-in-Chief
【Desk screen】scope + replicability + 35pp + summary all clear? [Y/N]
【Pipeline】≤ 3 papers under review for this author? [Y/N]
【Resubmit】reject is final unless invited — understood? [Y/N]

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — single-blind, EiC authority, three-paper cap (and 待核实 board notes)