Editorial standards and practices.

Theoretical Economics publishes research in all areas of economic theory. We welcome submissions in both pure and applied theory. Papers with empirical or experimental content will be considered, though a paper must contain a substantial and innovative theoretical component to be accepted. Please see the journal's requirements for experimental and computational components.

Theoretical Economics was founded with the aim of becoming the leading field journal in economic theory. Recent data suggest that TE has achieved this aim. The 2016 Annual Report contains a range of journal impact factors, calculated ten years after TE first appeared. And this recent working paper looks at citations over 2015–2019 and shows that TE ranks #11 among all journals and #1 among theory journals.

Turnaround.

An important goal of Theoretical Economics is to speed the review process. First, we aim to quickly conduct reviews. Second, we aim for most papers to go through at most two rounds of refereeing. To fulfill this goal, we try to write editorial letters that provide transparent sufficient conditions for publication, and reject papers that we believe are unlikely to be acceptable in a second round. We refrain from requesting overly speculative revisions and avoid "reject & resubmit" decisions. TE's turnaround statistics are available.

Paper length.

TE seeks to publish well-written papers that are cogent and focused. We encourage authors to write concisely, focus on the principal ideas, and resist lengthy extensions or "robustness checks." We have no strict maximum or minimum page limits, but the editor will usually return excessively long submissions to the authors and ask them to shorten them before initiating a review.

The length of a paper is a factor in TE's reviewing process. Authors should be aware that, when referees are faced with a very long manuscript, they often choose where to center their attention. It is always a good exercise to put onself in the shoes of a referee. A concise, focused paper affords the authors control over where the referees concentrate their attention. This generally leads to a more effective review. Shorter submissions also allow the journal to save on refereeing resources.

Within each issue, papers appear in increasing order of their length.

Supplementary appendices.

Supplementary online appendices should be avoided. Instead of including ancillary material in an online appendix, authors are advised to keep a coherent, self-contained, longer "working paper version" of the paper that may be referred to in the published paper and that can contain the additional material that would otherwise be included in an online appendix. The working paper version should be freely available in an online repository, such as the arXiv. In exceptional cases, when duly justified, an editor may allow for the inclusion of a supplementary appendix.

Conference proceedings.

TE allows submissions that have been published, or are under consideration for publication, as a very short "extended abstract" in a refereed conference proceedings (e.g.\ the extended abstracts published in the proceedings of ACM-EC). When a submission is based on any other form of publication in a refereed conference proceedings, it must make a significant and innovative contribution that goes beyond the conference paper. In particular, a submission that consists primarily of the exposition and proofs of results published in a conference volume (the "journal version" of a conference publication) is typically not considered a sufficient contribution for publication in TE. When submitting, authors should upload any conference publication as a supplemental document.