Over a year ago, I wrote a post tabulating the share of AER: Insights authors who have also published in a top-5 journal*. (The answer was 67%, significantly higher than most other journals, except those that generally solicit papers, like the Journal of Economic Literature.)
Now that AER: Insights is in its second year of publishing and has 60 forthcoming/published articles, I decided to revisit this question, again using Academic Sequitur data. The graph below shows the percent of authors that (a) have published/are forthcoming in a given journal in 2018-2020 and (b) have had at least one top-5 article published since 2000. The journals below are the top ten journals based on that metric.
With a score of 66%, AER: Insights still has the highest share of top-5 authors among journals where submissions are not generally solicited.** The next-highest journal, Theoretical Economics, is five percentage points behind. (There is some indication that the share for AER: Insights is coming down: for articles accepted in 2020, the top-5 share was “only” 60%.)
What if we condition on having two or more top-5 publications? That actually causes AER: Insights to move up in the ranking, overtaking Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.
Whether this pattern exists because AER: Insights is extremely selective or because less-established scholars are reluctant to submit their work to a new-ish journal or for some other reason is impossible to know without submission data. But no matter how you look at it, the group currently publishing in AER: Insights is quite elite.
*Top 5 is defined as American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economic Studies.
**AER: Insights would be even higher-ranked by this metric (#3) if we ignored top-5 publications in American Economic Review. Therefore, this pattern is not driven by the fact that both journals are published by the AEA.