The RAND Journal of Economics

About The RAND Journal of Economics

The RAND Journal of Economics at a Glance

The RAND Journal of Economics is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal of economics published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the RAND Corporation in the United States. Its print ISSN is 0741-6261 and its online ISSN is 1756-2171. The journal publishes theoretical and empirical research on industrial organization and closely related fields, including contracts, organizations, law and economics, and regulation. For more than four decades under its present name, and for more than five decades including its predecessor titles, it has been one of the principal specialist outlets for research on how firms, markets, and regulators interact.

Readers who encounter the journal for the first time should understand its particular place in economics. It is not a general-interest magazine, it is not a broad economics journal that publishes on every topic, and it is not a policy bulletin. It is a selective scholarly journal whose papers use formal theory, empirical analysis, or a careful pairing of the two to answer well-defined questions about competition, market structure, firm behaviour, and public regulation. A manuscript that fits this journal usually speaks directly to economists working in industrial organization, applied microeconomics, and related areas, and it is written to the standard those readers expect: a precise question, a transparent method, and results that change how a market or institution is understood.

Quick Facts

History and Identity

The journal was established in 1970 by the economics group at Bell Laboratories, the research arm associated with AT&T, under the title The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science. That origin matters. Bell Laboratories brought together economists, statisticians, and operations researchers who were interested in real industrial problems, including telecommunications, networks, pricing, and regulated industries. The journal therefore began with a practical industrial question at its centre rather than with abstract theory for its own sake, and that orientation has survived every change of title and publisher since.

From 1975 to 1983 the title was shortened to The Bell Journal of Economics. In 1984, following the transfer of the journal to the RAND Corporation, it acquired its present name, The RAND Journal of Economics. The RAND Corporation is a non-profit research institution based in the United States, and the journal should not be confused with RAND research reports or policy briefs. Those are separate RAND publications. The journal is an independently edited scholarly periodical published on behalf of RAND, with academic peer review and with contributions from authors at universities and research institutions around the world.

Publication is handled by Wiley-Blackwell. This arrangement is common for society and institution journals: the owning institution provides the journal's identity and editorial governance, while a large academic publisher provides the submission system, production, hosting, sales, and archiving infrastructure. Authors should therefore expect to interact with a Wiley-hosted journal page for submission instructions and published content, while understanding that the journal itself belongs to the RAND tradition rather than to a commercial journal portfolio in origin.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The publisher's own description of the scope is concise: theoretical and empirical research on industrial organization and closely related topics, including contracts, organizations, law and economics, and regulation. Each element of that sentence deserves attention, because editors use scope as a first screening device.

Industrial organization

Industrial organization studies how firms compete and how market structure affects prices, output, product quality, innovation, and welfare. Papers in this tradition examine oligopoly competition, mergers, cartels and collusion, vertical relationships between firms, platform markets, auctions in industrial settings, entry and exit, and strategic behaviour. A strong submission usually identifies a market mechanism clearly, models or measures it carefully, and draws a conclusion that would interest readers beyond the single industry studied, even when the empirical setting is a specific market.

Contracts and organizations

Work on contracts and organizations asks how agreements and internal firm structures shape incentives. Topics include principal-agent problems, procurement, franchising, supply relationships, employment contracts in their economic dimension, and the boundaries of the firm. The journal's interest here is economic analysis: how information, risk, and incentives are allocated, and with what consequences for efficiency. A purely descriptive account of a business practice, without an economic mechanism or evidence, is unlikely to fit.

Law and economics

Law and economics papers in this journal analyse legal rules using economic methods. Antitrust and competition law are natural subjects, as are liability, property, and regulatory enforcement where the analysis turns on incentives and market effects. Authors should frame the contribution as economics, engage with the relevant theoretical or empirical literature, and avoid writing a purely doctrinal legal commentary, which belongs in a law review rather than in this journal.

Regulation

Regulation research covers the design and effects of rules governing industries such as telecommunications, energy, transport, health care markets, and digital services. Papers may evaluate a regulatory intervention, compare regulatory regimes, or develop theory that clarifies a regulatory trade-off. Because regulated industries were central to the journal's Bell Laboratories origins, this remains a defining strand, now extended to platform governance, privacy, and data-driven markets.

What the Journal Does Not Usually Publish

Knowing the boundaries saves authors time. The journal is not the natural home for macroeconomic forecasting, general growth theory with no industrial or microeconomic mechanism, purely financial market studies with no connection to firm or market organization, or opinion pieces on economic policy. It also does not function as a working paper repository: submissions are expected to be complete, polished manuscripts that have already benefited from seminar and conference feedback. Survey articles appear only occasionally and usually by invitation or where a synthesis makes a clear scholarly contribution; authors considering a review should check the current author guidelines on the Wiley journal page before preparing one.

Editorial Standards and Peer Review

The RAND Journal of Economics is peer-reviewed. Manuscripts are assessed first for fit and contribution, and those sent for external review are evaluated by specialists chosen for their knowledge of the paper's topic and method. Reviewers in this field typically examine whether the research question is important, whether the model assumptions are stated and defensible, whether identification in empirical work is credible, whether the results are robust, and whether the paper is positioned honestly against prior work.

Selectivity is high, as it is at most long-established field journals. Authors should not interpret selectivity as a reason to inflate claims. Editors in industrial organization are experienced readers of theory and econometrics; overstated abstracts, selective reporting of specifications, and literature reviews that omit the closest competing papers are readily detected and damage a submission. The strongest papers are often narrower than their authors first imagined: one mechanism, established convincingly, is worth more than three mechanisms suggested loosely.

Indexing and Scholarly Standing

The journal is indexed in Scopus and in the Social Sciences Citation Index within Web of Science, and its content is discoverable through the major economics bibliographic services used by university libraries. SCImago, drawing on Scopus data, classifies it in Economics and Econometrics. Citation indicators for the journal, including its Journal Impact Factor in Journal Citation Reports and its CiteScore and SCImago Journal Rank, change with each annual release, so any specific figure quoted away from the source should be treated as dated. Readers who need a current figure for an evaluation, promotion file, or institutional report should read it directly from the current Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, or SCImago release rather than relying on a number copied onto a third-party website in an earlier year.

Standing in this field also rests on less mechanical evidence: the journal's long continuous history since 1970, its association with the RAND Corporation, its role in publishing influential work on competition and regulation, and the willingness of leading industrial organization economists to publish and review there. When authors weigh where to submit, that community standing, the quality of the likely readership, and the fit of the paper usually matter more than a single year's metric.

Reading the Metrics Responsibly

Metrics help researchers assess fit, but they must be interpreted in context. An impact factor is a journal-level average; it says nothing reliable about the quality or eventual citation count of an individual article. Industrial organization is a moderately sized field, so its journals will naturally show different citation volumes from very large fields such as general medicine or multidisciplinary science. Comparing the RAND Journal of Economics with journals in unrelated disciplines on a raw citation number is therefore misleading. A fairer comparison is within economics, and within that, among field journals in industrial organization, applied microeconomics, and law and economics.

Authors should also distinguish between acceptance difficulty and suitability. A paper can be excellent and still be wrong for this journal because its question belongs to another field. Conversely, a well-matched paper that speaks to an active debate among the journal's readers may perform better here than at a nominally higher-ranked general journal where few readers work on the topic.

Submitting a Manuscript

Submission is through the journal's official page hosted by Wiley. Before submitting, authors should read the current author guidelines there in full, because formatting requirements, submission categories, data and code expectations, and conflict-of-interest disclosures are maintained on that page and can change. The following preparation reflects the standards expected by journals of this type and will strengthen a submission to any selective economics journal.

Before you submit

First, state the contribution in one paragraph: the question, the approach, the main result, and why it matters for understanding a class of markets or institutions, not only the case studied. Second, read recent issues. If none of the last two volumes contains a paper recognisably related to yours, question the fit seriously. Third, prepare data and code for empirical work so that results can be reproduced; economics journals increasingly expect authors to be able to supply replication material on acceptance. Fourth, check that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere and that all co-authors approve the submission.

Writing the paper

Economics readers value an introduction that does real work: motivation, question, findings, and relation to the literature, in that order, without a long detour. Theory papers should explain the intuition of the main result in words as well as in propositions, and should be explicit about which assumptions drive the result. Empirical papers should present the institutional setting clearly enough that a reader outside that industry can follow the identification argument, and should report robustness checks in a way that is easy to audit. Length discipline matters: editors and referees read many papers, and a manuscript that reaches its results efficiently signals respect for that process.

What happens after submission

Timelines at selective journals vary, and a current expected decision time, if published, will be stated on the journal's own page; a figure is not publicly disclosed in the material consulted for this profile beyond that channel, so authors should check there rather than rely on anecdote. Possible outcomes include rejection without external review where fit or contribution is judged insufficient, rejection after review, an invitation to revise and resubmit, and acceptance conditional on final revisions. A revise-and-resubmit at a journal of this standing is a serious positive signal and should be answered point by point, with a response letter that quotes each referee concern and explains exactly where the revision addresses it.

Open Access and Charges

The journal operates primarily as a subscription journal with an optional open access route offered through the publisher for authors whose funders or institutions require it. Licence options, any article publication charge for the open access route, and waiver policies are set by Wiley and stated on the journal page; they change over time and are not stated here as fixed figures because a charge that could not be verified against the current official page should not be presented as current. Authors with a funder mandate should confirm compliance, including licence and deposit requirements, before choosing a publication route, and should check whether their institution holds a read-and-publish agreement with Wiley that covers the charge.

Who Reads the Journal

The core readership consists of academic economists in industrial organization and applied microeconomics, researchers at competition authorities and regulatory agencies, and graduate students specialising in those fields. Practitioners in antitrust and regulatory economics also follow the journal because its papers often bear directly on merger analysis, market definition, and the assessment of business conduct. For authors, this readership means a paper published here is likely to be read by the specialists best placed to cite, teach, and build on it, which is precisely the audience a field contribution needs.

How This Journal Differs from Neighbouring Titles

General economics journals publish the best work across all fields and accept only a small fraction of submissions in any one field. Field journals such as this one trade breadth for depth of readership. Compared with a general journal, the RAND Journal of Economics offers referees who know the specific literature intimately and readers who follow industrial organization continuously. Compared with a specialist newsletter, working paper series, or conference volume, it offers formal peer review, permanent archiving, and indexing in the major citation databases. Authors choosing between outlets should weigh that combination honestly against the topic and maturity of their manuscript.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of The RAND Journal of Economics?

The print ISSN is 0741-6261 and the online ISSN is 1756-2171. These are the identifiers recorded for this Journals World record and confirmed in publisher and indexing listings.

Who publishes The RAND Journal of Economics?

Wiley-Blackwell publishes the journal on behalf of the RAND Corporation, which has owned the journal since it took over from the Bell Laboratories tradition in 1984.

Is The RAND Journal of Economics peer-reviewed?

Yes. It is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Manuscripts undergo editorial screening and, where appropriate, external review by subject specialists.

What was the journal called before 1984?

It began in 1970 as The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science and was titled The Bell Journal of Economics from 1975 to 1983. Citations to those titles refer to the same journal lineage.

How often does it appear?

Quarterly, with four issues per year.

Does it publish empirical as well as theoretical work?

Yes. Its stated scope covers both theoretical and empirical research, and many of its strongest papers combine a clear model with evidence, or develop theory that is directly disciplined by an institutional setting.

Where do I submit?

Through the official journal page hosted by Wiley. Always use the submission route and author guidelines shown there, not an email address or link copied from an unofficial listing, and verify the ISSN on the page matches 0741-6261 before sending a manuscript or any payment connected with publication.

Landmark Themes in the Journal's Pages

Several research programmes that now define industrial organization were developed substantially in journals of this type, and the RAND Journal of Economics has carried influential work across all of them. The economics of two-sided platforms, in which a business serves two groups whose value depends on each other's participation, became a central topic as digital markets grew, and papers here have examined platform pricing, compatibility, and competition between platforms. Auction and procurement research has addressed how buyers should design competition among suppliers and what bidding behaviour reveals. Vertical contracting research has asked when arrangements between manufacturers and retailers benefit consumers and when they foreclose rivals. Empirical merger analysis, using modern demand estimation, has changed how competition authorities simulate the effects of a proposed combination of firms. Reading back volumes with these themes in mind is an efficient way for a doctoral student to learn how the field's questions evolved from the regulated telephone industry of the journal's early years to the platform economy of today.

The journal also illustrates how methods travel. Structural econometric models first refined in industrial settings are now used in health, education, and environmental economics, fields whose market questions resemble those of industry. Authors from those areas who borrow the methods often publish in this journal when their contribution speaks back to the core industrial organization literature, and they publish in their own field journals when the contribution is primarily substantive for their own area. That distinction, method contribution versus subject contribution, is one of the most practical tests of fit an author can apply before submitting.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the journal's record on Journals World (print ISSN 0741-6261, online ISSN 1756-2171, publisher Wiley), the publisher's journal description of its scope, and indexing and bibliographic listings including Scopus and SCImago. Historical details of the Bell Journal titles and the 1984 transfer to the RAND Corporation are documented in the journal's publication history as reproduced in standard bibliographic references. Metric figures are deliberately not frozen in this profile because they are revised annually; consult the current Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, or SCImago release for the figure in force at the time you need it.