Thanks so much for this thread, it really demystifies submitting to AER:I. I love the format, and I agree with your conclusions that with some many journals now accepting short papers it becomes less risky to write up a short paper.
AER:I is now in its sixth year of existence. It grew out of AER’s short papers section and aims to publish papers that are of the same quality and importance as AER but succinct.
What is “succinct”? Papers can be up to 7,000 words if there are no tables/figures. For every table or figure, the word limit falls by 200 words. The reasoning is that not every important finding needs to be part of a 50+ page paper: some ground-breaking insights are simple! (pun intended)
The short paper format is becoming increasingly popular. Journals that have explicit policies of accepting short papers include the AEJs, REStat, EJ, JF, JUE: Insights, JDE, JPubE, Health Economics, Economics Letters, and Applied Economics Letters.
Papers must be genuinely self-contained: taking a long paper and putting half the tables/figures into the appendix is unlikely to work unless they were not central to the paper to begin with.
There’s no limit on the length of an appendix, but we are strict in requiring that discussion of appendix material be very short (no paragraphs spent describing appendix robustness checks).
“Compound” tables and figures are allowed, within reason. In other words, multiple panels within a table/figure are perfectly fine, as long as everything is legible.
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