Editor & Committee Strategy (arecon-editor-strategy)

Editor & Committee Strategy (arecon-editor-strategy)

When to trigger

• The Editorial Committee invited the topic and you are negotiating the review's scope
• You want to anticipate what ARE referees of a review will push on (different from a paper)
• The editor has asked you to expand, cut, or rebalance coverage
• You are calibrating how the Committee-driven review cycle and the Annual Reviews production timeline work

Who you are working with at ARE

ARE is run by an Editorial Committee of senior economists (current co-editors 检索于 2026-06-22：Philippe Aghion, Hélène Rey, Timothy Besley；re-verify before relying — the Committee rotates on five-year terms；以官网为准) plus the journal's production editors at Annual Reviews. Your primary partners differ by phase: the commissioning editor / Committee owns scope and acceptance; the production editor owns format, figures, copyediting, and the volume schedule. Because the article is commissioned, the relationship is more collaborative than adversarial — the Committee wants the review to succeed — but acceptance is not automatic: an invited manuscript still goes through review for accuracy, rigor, and balance (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准).

How review differs for a review article

ARE referees do not check an identification strategy or replicate results — there are none of the author's own. They evaluate the review as a review:

Referees of an ARE review are often the reviewed authors themselves — the people whose work is being weighed will read how you weighed it. This makes balance and accurate attribution strategic, not just ethical.

Economics-specific editorial posture

• Treat the editor conversation as a scope contract about literatures, mechanisms, and evidence hierarchies: theory, quasi-experimental work, structural models, macro evidence, and applied micro fields may each expect different standards of synthesis.
• When an editor asks for broader coverage, answer by naming the economic question the added work changes: mechanism, welfare implication, identification lesson, policy margin, market design, or macro/finance channel.
• Push back on additions that turn the piece into a handbook chapter; ARE value comes from a field-level economic framework plus selective appraisal, not from listing every empirical setting.

Scope negotiation with the Committee

• Lock scope early, in writing. The invitation/acceptance stage is where scope is cheapest to change. Confirm the boundaries with the editor before months of reading.
• Negotiate, don't capitulate, on coverage asks. If a referee or editor wants an added literature, assess whether it fits the spine; propose where it goes or explain why it is out of scope — a review cannot grow without bound and must stay in the ~25–40-page envelope (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准).
• Surface conflicts of interest. If a likely referee is a central author you must critique, tell the editor — Annual Reviews requires disclosure of potential bias, and it protects both the process and you.
• Respect the volume schedule. ARE publishes one volume per year; production has fixed deadlines. A late draft can slip a whole volume. Confirm the timeline with the production editor and plan backward from it.