How Are the Mighty Fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists

The authors asked the world's leading economists to describe instances in which journals rejected their articles. More than sixty essays, by a broadly diverse group that includes fifteen Nobel Prize winners, indicate that most have suffered publication rejection, often frequently. Indeed, journals have rejected many papers that later became classics. The authors discuss the prize-winners' experiences, other notable cases, and rejections by John Maynard Keynes when he edited the Economic Journal. Finally, they search in economists' almost universal experience of rejection for patterns and lessons about the publication process.

[1]  H. Hotelling The Economics of Exhaustible Resources , 1931, Journal of Political Economy.

[2]  The Law of Decreasing Costs , 1931 .

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[4]  Milton Friedman,et al.  Professor Pigou's Method for Measuring Elasticities of Demand from Budgetary Data , 1935 .

[5]  P. Samuelson,et al.  Protection and Real Wages , 1941 .

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[7]  A Future Role for the Econometric Society in International Statistics , 1948 .

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[12]  Competition and Democracy , 1958, The Journal of Law and Economics.

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[17]  R. Lucas Expectations and the neutrality of money , 1972 .

[18]  F. Black,et al.  The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities , 1973, Journal of Political Economy.

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[25]  P. Krugman,et al.  Target Zones and Exchange Rate Dynamics , 1991 .

[26]  W. Arthur,et al.  INCREASING RETURNS AND LOCK-IN BY HISTORICAL EVENTS , 1989 .

[27]  R. Blank The Effects of Double-Blind versus Single-Blind Reviewing: Experimental Evidence from The American Economic Review , 1991 .

[28]  Peter L. Bernstein,et al.  Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street , 1991 .

[29]  D. Moggridge Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography , 1992 .

[30]  Noshir Contractor,et al.  Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos: Journal of Communication , 1994 .

[31]  Kenneth J. Arrow,et al.  Rejected : leading economists ponder the publication process , 1995 .