Well over a year has passed since we released EctJ’s previous Newsletter. Much has happened.
Events
Aureo de Paula gave the Econometrics Journal Lecture at the 34th (EC)^2 Conference in Manchester, on “Production function estimation using subjective expectations data”.
At the 2024 RES Annual Conference in Belfast, Mariacristina De Nardi delivered the Sargan Lecture, on “Health inequality and health types”, and Óscar Jordá and Geert Mesters presented in EctJ’s Special Session on Macroeconomic Policy Analysis. We expect to publish all three papers in 2025.
At the conference’s gala dinner, Alexander Kreiss was awarded the 2023 Denis Sargan Econometrics Prize, for his May 2023 article “Inference in regression discontinuity designs with high-dimensional covariates” with Christoph Rothe.
We also have some great events to look forward to. Matias Cattaneo will give the Econometrics Journal Lecture, on “Smoothed pairwise difference estimators: Distribution theory and bootstrap inference”, at the 35th (EC)^2 Conference in Amsterdam from December 6-7. Stéphane Bonhomme will deliver the Sargan Lecture at the 2025 Annual Conference, which will be held in Birmingham from June 30 – July 2, 2025. The editors are currently finalizing EctJ’s Special Session at this conference.
Editors and editorial office
We warmly thank our outgoing editors Tobias Klein, Joan Llull, and Victor Chernozhukov for their invaluable service to EctJ.
Tobias came to the end of his second term as deputy managing editor last year, just after the release of the previous Newsletter. He made key contributions to professionalizing EctJ’s operations, to the point we can now safely run EctJ without a deputy managing editor. He piloted EctJ’s and EJ’s replication package checks in 2017, which paved the way for a now common routine at RES and beyond. He eventually handed replication over to the RES data editor, Joan Llull. Joan did so well that he was recruited by the Econometric Society last year to set up their data operation. RES appointed a worthy successor from July 2023, Florian Oswald.
Victor came to the end of his third term as coeditor. Victor played a key role in developing and implementing the 2017 editorial reforms at EctJ, which brought an aim for focused papers with relevance to empirical economics and a commitment to quick review with only few and minor revisions. Christoph Rothe took his place from May 1.
Five fine academics agreed to join EctJ as associate editors (AEs) from 1 January 2024: Hiroyuki Kasahara, Jiaying Gu, Laura Liu, Max Farrell, and Yinchu Zhu. At the same time, 13 current AEs accepted renewed appointments after serving three or less terms, one AE chose not to, and 15 AEs came to the end of their fourth and final terms. The latter started at EctJ in 2012, have accompanied the journal through many changes, and have been of great help throughout.
The editorial office moved from Tilburg University to RES in London. The RES senior publications manager, Brooke Sperry, took charge of the EctJ office, assisted by Nicky Cotterill.
Publication
EctJ has published five print issues since the previous newsletter. Their Editors’ Choices of lead article are
- Alexander Kreiss and Christoph Rothe’s “Inference in regression discontinuity designs with high-dimensional covariates“ (May 2023);
- Matthew Masten and Alexandre Poirier’s “Choosing exogeneity assumptions in potential outcome models“ (September 2023);
- Rahul Singh and Liyang Sun’s “Double robustness for complier parameters and a semi-parametric test for complier characteristics“ (January 2024);
- Arthur Lewbel, Xi Qu, and Xun Tang’s “Ignoring measurement errors in social networks“ (May 2024); and
- Robert Adamek, Stephan Smeekes, and Ines Wilms’s “Local projection inference in high dimensions“ (September 2024).
They also contain special issues resulting from EctJ’s Special Sessions on The New Differences-in-Differences and Weak Identification, the 2021 Sargan Lecture by Guido Imbens (with Dmitry Arkhangelsky), and the 2022 Sargan Lecture by Serena Ng (with Susannah Scanlan).
We also have some great material lined up for publication. The January 2025 issue will celebrate the seminal contributions of Philip G. Wright to causal inference in economics. At its core is a reproduction of Appendix B in Wright’s 1928 book The Tariff on Animal and Vegetable Oils. Our editorial will offer a modern perspective on Wright’s text and introduce the other contributions to this issue:
- Paul Hünermund and Elias Bareinboim’s “Causal inference and data fusion in econometrics”;
- Kirill Borusyak, Xavier Jaravel, and Peter Hull’s “Design-based identification with formula instruments: A review”; and
- Andrew Chesher and Adam Rosen’s “Extending the scope of instrumental variable methods”.
We expect to include Frank Diebold’s 2023 Sargan Lecture “On robust inference in time series regression” and the proceedings of the 2024 Conference in a later issue of 2025.
Impact
EctJ’s most recent Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of 3.0 places it among JBES (2.9), JASA (3.0), JRSSB (3.1), and AnnStat (3.2). It is ahead of JAE (2.3), QE (1.9), JFE (1.8), ET (1.0), and ER (0.8); and behind Econometrica (6.6) and JoE (9.9). The five main contributors to the most recent JIF are
- Clément de Chaisemartin and Xavier D’Haultfœuille’s “Two-way fixed effects and differences-in-differences with heterogeneous treatment effects: a survey” (September 2023),
- Andreas Olden and Jarle Møen’s “The triple difference estimator” (September 2022),
- Ghislain Aihounton and Anne Henningsen’s “Units of measurement and the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation” (May 2021),
- Vira Semenova and Victor Chernozhukov’s “Debiased machine learning of conditional average treatment effects and other causal functions” (May 2021), and
- Peter Reinhard Hansen’s “Relative contagiousness of emerging virus variants: an analysis of the Alpha, Delta, and Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variants” (September 2022).
As in earlier years, EctJ scores relative well in terms of its Article Influence Score (4.824), which does not simply count citations, like the JIF, but also accounts for their importance, using eigenfactor.com’s network analysis. In terms of this measure, EctJ is 25th out of 605 Economics journals and 4th out of 168 Statistics & Probability journals, ahead of all the competitor journals mentioned above except Econometrica (14.259), JRSSB (6.329), and JoE (5.908).
Our 2023 Annual Report provides further statistics.
Submitting to EctJ
We hope that you will send your best research in econometrics to EctJ. By submitting to EctJ, you will not only benefit from the exposure of your work in a high-impact journal, but also from fast review and publication. If you do, please pay attention to our submission guidelines. In particular, use the LaTeX template, include an empirical application, make sure the submission is not too long (normally about 20 pages, including printed appendix), and properly place proofs and simulation results (or provide a well-motivated request for exemptions).
I am looking forward to your submissions!
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