any clue?
QJE % acceptance if Barro does not reject?
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QJE nowadays gets by for the most submissions of all top 5 journals (more than 1000 most recently per year). That's because they are so fast that most authors try there first without much cost. Yet they only publish 30-40 papers per year.
Compare to the AER, which gets around 700 submissions per year and publishes about 120-130 papers.
QJE is the most selective econ journal currently as they get to pick from a huge pool of submissions. So they have to reject many amazing papers. The reason why the journal is nonetheless so popular with authors is that they are extremely reliable (never takes them more than 3 months), and precisely because they desk-reject so much (up to 80% of submissions), which typically takes only a few days.
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^ I guess you are trolling, but the numbers are not correct. For the last five years, the AER had > 1600 submissions per year, and at least last year, it was similar with REStud.
In addition, the number of submissions is not equal to the number of quality submissions, which I would say is the number of submissions sent out for review. By this metric, the QJE is not necessarily the most competitive journal.