Submitting a paper

To submit a paper to Theoretical Economics,

• The submitting author must be a member of the Econometric Society
• The submitting author must pay a submission fee with the exceptions noted below. The fee is 100 USD for regular members and 50 USD for student members.
• All authors must be registered users of Theoretical Economics.

To submit the paper please go to the paper submission page, which will ask you to log in if you have not already done so.

Joining the Econometric Society

To join the Econometric Society, please go to https://www.econometricsociety.org/user/register.

Submission fee

When you submit a paper, you are required to pay the submission fee (100 USD for regular members and 50 USD for student members). This fee is used to pay for the journal's operational expenses; the Econometric Society is a registered non-profit organization. The fee must be paid via credit card in the last step of the submission process.

You do not have to pay the fee if

• The paper is an invited resubmission
• The paper is being transferred from Econometrica
• You are working in a low income country as classified by the World Bank.

If your paper is desk rejected by the Editor, you will not be refunded your submission fee. If you have questions about the submission fee, please contact the contact the editorial office.

Submission requirements

Please ensure your submission meets the following requirements.

• The working paper is publicly available on a website (e.g. personal website, ArXiV, SSRN). The editor may grant exceptions to this policy.

• References cited in all published papers must be published, available in a stable public archive (like one that participates in RePEc, including MPRA), or provided by the authors of the manuscript at the time of final publication. The editor may grant exceptions to this policy.

• Papers must be submitted as pdf files. The size of the text font must be at least 12 point, each page must contain no more than 32 lines (with line spacing of at least 1.5), and all margins must be at least 1.25in (3.2cm). Please include each figure and table on the relevant page in the paper; do not collect figures and tables at the end of the paper. The list of references should appear after any appendices, at the very end of the paper. Within the body of the text, references should be in the author-year style.

  One way to meet these requirements is to use the Econometric Society's LaTeX template. To get the template and the associated LaTeX class and configuration files, go to Society's LaTeX support page and download the zip file using the button at the top of the page. (Alternatively, if you use git you can clone the repository.) To prepare a paper for submission, use the draft option in te_template.tex.

• The use of supplementary online appendices should be minimized. In particular, proofs and ancillary material should be part of the main file (possibly as a regular appendix). Please consult the editorial standards page for further details.

• We encourage authors to keep their submissions concise and, in particular, to avoid long introductions and a proliferation of extensions. See our editorial statement.

• In an effort to prevent plagiarism, the Econometric Society subscribes to Similarity Check to screen its submissions. Similarity Check has a "database of current and archival scholarly literature" and uses the iThenticate tool to "compare authored work against the content in the database and highlight matching or similar text for further editorial review." Submission to ES journals implies permission of the Society to check the submission electronically for plagiarism, using the Similarity Check system.

Our editorial standards page gives information on the kinds of papers Theoretical Economics publishes. Information about our targets and performance is available. Econometric Society journals do not permit the use of \textcircled{r} to indicate that authors have been selected according to certified random order, but authors are free to indicate their relative contributions in a footnote.

Transfers from Econometrica

If you have a paper rejected by Econometrica, you may request a transfer to Theoretical Economics. This is entirely optional. If you opt for a transfer, the journal waives the submission fee and the Theoretical Economics editor sees the referee reports and cover letter; with the permission of the referees, the Theoretical Economics editor also sees the identity of the referees and their cover letters. The editorial process at Theoretical Economics is completely independent of that at Econometrica. Editors may go back to one or two of the previous referees, but will typically consult new ones too.

If you do request a transfer, please provide a cover letter describing how your submission differs from the paper reviewed by Econometrica. Please explain how you have responded to the major points raised by the referees (e.g. "we have made change X, we have not done change Y but could do so, while change Z is infeasible"). You should not feel obliged to implement all the suggestions made by the Econometrica referees, but should adopt suggestions that you think makes the paper better for Theoretical Economics. In particular, you should refrain from adding extensions that add to the length of the paper. If we use the same referees, your responses will be forwarded to them.

Publication fee

A publication fee is currently set at 50% of the cost of production.

Specifically, accepted papers will incur a fixed per page fee for any typeset material. The publication fee will be collected after final proofs but before publication and invoiced at the then-prevailing rate (12 USD per page as of January 2023).

Authors of accepted papers residing in countries classified as either low-income or lower-middle income by the World Bank may request an exemption from the publication fee. The list of those countries can be found here under the headings LOW-INCOME ECONOMIES and LOWER-MIDDLE INCOME ECONOMIES.

Format of accepted papers

When a paper is accepted we request that authors make sure it satisfies our style guidelines, illustrated in this sample. One way to produce this format is to use our LaTeX template, with the final option. (If you prepared your paper for submission using the template, you merely have to change the option from draft to final.)