Four New Economics Journals

The American Economic Association is going to pulbish four new journals starting in 2009:

AEJ: Macroeconomics: macroeconomics; monetary economics; international finance; aggregate aspects of development; economic growth; finance; and comparative economic systems. Editor: Olivier Blanchard.

AEJ: Microeconomics: microeconomic theory; corporate finance; industrial organization; micro theory aspects of economic development; and micro aspects of international economics. Editor: Andrew Postlewaite.

AEJ: Economic Policy: public economics; urban and regional economics; public policy aspects of health, education, and welfare; law and economics; economic regulation; and environmental and natural resource economics. Editor: Esther Duflo.

AEJ: Applied Economics: labor; demography; empirical micro development; and health, education, and welfare economics. Editor: Alan Auerbach.

Tyler Cowen doesn't sound too happy about this:

Overall I consider this bad news. It expands the career-making power of one professional association and the editors it nominates. It further encourages overspecialization, and discourages general interest research. It discourages research in the area of whichever journal becomes the weak sister of the four. It makes it harder for an individual piece to stand out as important. The real issue is why articles should be bundled into journals at all. Splitting one journal (the AER) into four doesn't answer this question for me.

My hunch is Dr. Cowen is right. Being relatively new to academia, I have also not understood why articles should be bundled into journals. I could tell a path dependency story to explain why this was so historically and why it persists, but in the age of JSTOR and the internet it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

On the other hand, it does seem like the journals in general do serve a valuable purpose in bringing both reviewers and researchers together to perform peer review and quality checks on research. While this process is certainly far from perfect, it is also far from being completely imperfect.

Having said that, with approximately zero publication and distribution costs for new articles thanks to the advent of the internet, it seems like journals do not serve the essential role they once did. The question of quality control still may be an issue, but is there any reason that couldn't be handled in the marketplace of ideas? For example, if some truly brilliant original work was produced and distributed online, wouldn't the number of citations from other researchers emphasize the true value of a piece of academic scholarship? Is there a valuable role being played by journals in keeping intellectual property and attracting attention to articles of particular merit? Is there any reason some type of website play the same role?

P.S. -- Andrew at Statistical Modeling disagrees...