Retrospective Evaluation (1961–1996)
The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance
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Retrospective Evaluation (1961–1996)
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1. Introduction | Top |
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The QREF is observing its 40th birthday in the same year we enter the new millennium. The
journal has had a rich history dedicated to publishing manuscripts that represent high quality
academic research. The QREF has gained recognition as one of the leading journals among those
affiliated with regional disciplinary associations. This special issue is being prepared to provide
researchers with a complete author and subject index of articles published in QREF and its
predecessor, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Business. While the provision of the index
is the main purpose of this issue, we also wish to make a brief retrospective assessment, including
some comments on the editorial policy of the journal, the subject matter of articles published in
the journal, its readership and its electronic presence and dissemination. This is also a good
opportunity to look back on our successes and forward to the next 40+ years.
2. Brief history | Top |
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The inaugural issue of the journal was published in 1961 under the title of The Quarterly Review of Economics and Business. Marvin Frankel, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, served as the first editor. The journal owes much of its stability to the fact that it has had only 7 editors in its 40-year history. Those editors, in addition to Marvin Frankel, are Herbert I. Schiller, Joseph D. Phillips, Paul Uselding, C.F. Lee, Richard J. Arnould and Joseph E. Finnerty.
The early editors of QREB made great efforts to maintain the journal as a general business and economics journal. This policy was appropriate through the first decade or two of QREB. General journals of this nature thrived throughout this period. In the 80's there was an explosive growth in the number of specialty and subspecialty journals in all areas of business, finance, marketing, accounting and economics. This made it difficult to maintain consistent quality and broad coverage of the various disciplinary areas that fit under the rubric of business and economics. Under the editorship of Paul Uselding, ``special issue editors'' were chosen and given the task of developing entire issues centered on themes contained within the narrower confines of a single discipline such as marketing or accounting.
In 1987 with the transition of the editorship to C.F. Lee and Richard Arnould, the decision was made to concentrate the content on subjects within the areas of economics and finance. In 1992, the name of the journal was changed to The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance. This has provided various benefits that enhance the quality of the journal. The journal already was widely recognized by economists. Finance was an easy choice for the other area of concentration because the disciplines are highly complementary and finance has increasingly become an area in which high quality research is produced. The complementary nature of the areas is exhibited by the fact that we attempt to maintain approximately a 50–50 balance in coverage of these areas.
However, when we retrospectively review the extent to which we have achieved this balance we
often discover that one-third or more of the articles could be assigned to either area. Current
plans are to continue this mix.
3. Special issues and focus areas | Top |
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| Table 1 | ||||
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| Special Issues published in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 1961-2000 | ||||
| Topic | Year | Vol. | Papers | Editor(s) |
| The International Element In Basic Managerial Education | 1961 | 1.4 | 5 | J. Fayerweather |
| Inflation And Current Value Accounting | 1979 | 19.1 | 11 | J.C. McKeown |
| Export Diversification And The New Protectionism: The Experience Of Latin America | 1981 | 21.2 | 15 | W. Baer, M. Gillis |
| Oliver Williamson's Corporation: Fifty Years After Berle and Means | 1984 | 24.4 | 5 | S.M. Loescher |
| Health Care Policy: Where Is the Revolution Headed? | 1990 | 30.4 | 13 | R.J. Arnould, L.F. Rossiter and L.F. Schifrin |
| Latin America: The Crisis Of The Eighties And The Opportunities Of The Nineties | 1991 | 31.3 | 10 | W. Baer, J. Petry and M. Simpson |
| Latin America: Privatization, Property Rights, And Deregulation 1 | 1993 | 33.S | 11 | W. Baer, M. Conroy |
| Latin America: Privatization, Property Rights, And Deregulation 2 | 1994 | 34.S | 14 | W. Baer, M. Conroy |
| Illinois Centennial Essays On Economics | 1996 | 36.S | 12 | W. Baer, H.F. Williamson |
| The Economics Of Immigrant Skill And Adjustment | 1997 | 37.S | 10 | B.R. Chiswick |
| The Changing Role Of International Capital In Latin America | 1998 | 38.3 | 14 | W. Baer |
| Real Options: Developments And Applications | 1998 | 38.S | 12 | G.E. Pinches |
| Women At The End Of The Millennium: What We Know, What We Need To Know | 1999 | 39.S | 12 | M.A. Ferber |
| Retrospective Evaluation Including Comprehensive Index | 2000 | 40.5 | - | R.J. Arnould |
Special issues of the journal have been published sporadically since its inception in 1961. However, since the 1990s they have become a major feature of the journal.
QREF publishes 5 issues annually. Part of an issue is sometimes devoted to the coverage of a special topic, a Focus Area. A list of all published Special Issues and Focus Areas from 1961 to 2000 is provided in Tables 1 and 2.
Usually special issues are devoted to one topic and are put together by a ``special issue editor''. The articles contained in special issues may have been presented at a symposium or solicited by the special issue editor. All articles in special issues are refereed. However, the process is somewhat different than for regular issues. Typically for special issues, the special issue editor serves as one referee and assigns another independent referee. Benefits of special issues to the journal are the broad and thorough coverage of important and timely issues and the attraction of important and well-known authors. A benefit to the special issue editor and authors is that these issues are published in a timely manner. Special issues are among our most frequently cited issues.
| Table 2 | ||||
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| Focus Areas published in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 1995-2000 | ||||
| Topic | Year | Vol. | Papers | Editor(s) |
| Future Markets In The 21st Century | 1995 | 35.2 | 3 | R. Leuthold |
| The Changing Role Of The State In Latin America | 1996 | 36.2 | 4 | W. Baer |
| Drawing The Right Lesson From The S&L Insurance Mess | 1996 | 36.3 | 3 | E.J. Kane |
| Minority Banking Issues | 1997 | 37.1 | 2 | |
| Before The Welfare State: Learning From Early Experiments With Public Relief In The Nineteenth Century | 1997 | 37.2 | 3 | K.D. Kauffman |
| Native Americans: Then And Now | 1997 | 37.4 | 4 | B.R. Chiswick |
| Mergers And Acquisitions, On The Welfare Effects Of Mergers: Short Run vs. Long Run | 1998 | 38.1 | 4 | |
| Prices In World Markets | 1999 | 39.1 | 4 | |
| International Studies | 1999 | 39.2 | 4 | |
| Market Reactions | 1999 | 39.3 | 3 | |
| Health Care Issues | 1999 | 39.4 | 4 | W.D. White |
| Bank Privatization And Restructuring: The Case Of Brazil | 2000 | 40.1 | 4 | W. Baer, W. Miles |
| Risk | 2000 | 40.2 | 3 | |
| Labor Markets | 2000 | 40.3 | 3 | |
| Financial Institutions | 2000 | 40.4 | 3 | |
In the mid-1990s we began publishing ``Focus Areas''. These differ from special issues in two ways. The topic usually is narrowly focused and they are less than full issues -- usually 2--4 articles and most often 3. Occasionally a focus area has a special editor but this is not always the case. The concept of focus areas arose at a conference in which a session was being chaired by a distinguished economist on a timely policy issue. Clearly, this material merited publication in an academic journal but most journals could not publish it in a timely fashion. A decision was made to allocate space in each regular issue to a focus area. The benefits of this to the journal and authors are similar to those of a special issue. The papers for focus issues can be the result of an individual session at a professional meeting, they may be solicited by focus area editors, and occasionally are the serendipitous result of articles on a very narrow and similar subject being ready for publication at approximately the same time.
We regularly solicit special issue and focus area editors. In some cases research scholars
volunteer to develop these features. The co-editors of the journal hold the final decision of the
acceptability of the subject matter and the articles.
4. Editorial policy | Top |
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The goal of QREF is to provide a source for the dissemination of high quality research in economics and finance. A secondary goal is the dissemination of this research beyond the boundaries of the academy to researchers and users of research in government and industry.
We have been pleased with our successes for a variety of reasons. In 1979, QREF was chosen to be the journal of the Midwest Economic Association. The Midwest Finance Association chose QREF as its official journal in 1995.
Also QREF enjoys a large, worldwide institutional subscription base. Articles published in the journal are frequently cited in articles published elsewhere and the Journal can justifiably claim that it has made a major contribution in the disciplinary areas of economics and finance.
Finally, over 10% of our subscriptions are non-university institutions. These include national ministries, the IMF, the World Bank as well as research departments of banks and financial institutions.
The articles published in the journal must represent the results of high quality research on subjects in the disciplinary areas of economics and finance. Clearly, this leaves room for substantial breadth of topics. There has been no effort to concentrate on specific areas within economics and finance. However, most of the articles published are based on applied work rather than being purely theoretical in nature.
Within economics, QREF has published many articles that address topics in labor, development, macroeconomic policy and industrial organization but all areas have received coverage.
The heaviest concentration of articles in finance is in the areas of financial institutions and financial markets. Not surprisingly banking, and monetary policy issues are popular areas that overlap economics and finance.
The QREF has rigid standards for acceptance of a manuscript for publication. All submissions are double blind refereed. When the original referees deliver substantially different appraisals, the manuscript may be sent to an additional referee. We are proud of the caliber of the referees used by the co-editors. A recent unpublished study conducted by a committee of the American Economic Association found that QREF regularly used referees of substantial reputation relative to those of peer journals.
We receive approximately 100 manuscripts per year of which approximately 25% are
eventually accepted. We hope to achieve a 10-week turn-around, but realize that this is not
always possible -- particularly since many of our referees are scholars at leading
institutions who receive refereeing requests from many journals. While all manuscripts
must meet the standards of the referees and the editors, we have a policy of exhibiting
more patience with articles from two sources: those known to be papers submitted by
young scholars (generally assistant professors) and papers that were originally presented
at the MEA and MFA annual meetings. If referees believe manuscripts fitting into these
categories have promise, more effort is made to assist the author in the process of getting
the manuscript to an acceptable level.
5. Authors, readers and editors | Top |
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From the outset The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance's editorial board and author base have been predominantly from the USA. Also in terms of readership the Journal has always held a strong foothold in the USA.
85% of the Quarterly Review's authors are stemming from the USA. The remainder 15% is stemming from all over the world. Countries that are well represented in that respect are a few Latin American countries such as Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Columbia. This figure might be somewhat biased due to the publication of various Special Issues/Focus Areas on Latin American subjects. Also authors from the Pacific Rim such as Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan and Australia have contributed quite significantly.
Looking at the authors in terms of their institutional affiliation up to 90% have been from universities and the remainder 10% are from other institutions such as the World Bank and Federal Reserve Banks.
Main coverage of the total institutional readers base is located in the USA (68.5%), however the journal has a growing presence in both Western Europe (10.5%) and Australasia (15%). In the last year the subscriber base in Australasia grew with some 30% (mainly due to growth in Japan).
The institutional reader base consists of 90% university subscribers and 10% of this group is the
so-called governmental and corporate institutional subscribers. Corporate subscribers include
research departments of (central) banks, security and exchange committees. Governmental
subscribers are national ministries, European bodies and world institutes like the IMF and the
World Bank, also Federal Reserve Banks fall under this category.
Fig. 1. Geographical spread of institutional subscribers, The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2000.
Figure 1 depicts the geographical spread of the total group of
institutional subscribers, divided
into university and non-university subscribers.
6. Electronic presence and dissemination | Top |
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QREF maintains two Web sites. A limited WEB site is maintained by the editors at the University of Illinois at: http//www.cba.uiuc.edu/research, which provides general information about the journal, and its editorial, submission, and subscription policies. Since 2000 QREF has had its own WEB site at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jnlabr/quaeco providing the following information on the journal:
ECONbase is updated daily. All information within ECONbase – except for the complete papers section per individual journal – is within the public domain. Functionalities such as being able to search through the headings (titles, authors, abstracts, key words) and to retrieve abstracts of all journals are free. For the public section, no registration is needed. Condition to access the complete paper section of the journals is in all cases that the library should hold a current institutional subscription to the printed version of the journal(s) concerned. Each month some 35,000 active distinct hosts currently visit ECONbase.
During the period March to September 2000, the QREF website was visited by over 847 distinct hosts. These hosts requested the full text of a number of articles availble from QREF's website. Table 3 depicts the top 25 of most downloaded papers during the months March to September. The availability of articles in the complete papers archive is 12 months upon publication of the article.
| Table 3 | ||
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| Top 25 Full-text downloads, March--September 2000, The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance | ||
| Authors | Title | Total of |
| Requests | ||
| Silvapulle P., Choi J.-S. | Testing for Linear and Nonlinear Granger Causality in the Stock Price-Volume Relation: Korean Evidence | 131 |
| Baer W., Nazmi N. | Privatization and restructuring of banks in Brazil | 110 |
| Cuthbertson K., Hayes S., Nitzsche D. | Explaining Movements in UK Stock Prices | 89 |
| Ferber M.A. | Introduction | 84 |
| McKenzie M.D., Brooks R.D., Faff R.W., Ho Y.K. | Exploring the economic rationale of extremes in GARCH generated betas The case of U.S. banks | 84 |
| Baer W., Miles W. | Introduction | 82 |
| Hassapis C., Kalyvitis S., Pittis N. | Cointegration and joint efficiency of international commodity markets | 81 |
| Ahmed E., Rosser J.B., Uppal J.Y. | Evidence of Nonlinear Speculative Bubbles in Pacific-Rim Stock Markets | 80 |
| Aarstol M.P. | Inflation and debt maturity | 80 |
| Makler H.M. | Bank transformation and privatization in Brazil Financial federalism and some lessons about bank privatization | 79 |
| Lee H.W., Figlewicz R.E. | Characteristics of firms that issue convertible debt versus convertible preferred stock | 78 |
| Studart R. | Financial opening and deregulation in Brazil in the 1990s Moving towards a new pattern of development financing? | 78 |
| Ness Jr., W.L. | Reducing government bank presence in the Brazilian financial system Why and how | 71 |
| Filbeck G., Mullineaux D.J. | Agency costs and dividend payments | 67 |
| Cassano M.A. | Learning and mean reversion in asset returns | 67 |
| Ferreira E.J., Smith S.D. | Stock price reactions to recommendations in the Wall Street Journal ``Small Stock Focus'' column | 63 |
| Sopranzetti B.J. | Selling accounts receivable and the underinvestment problem | 60 |
| Kish R.J., Hogan K.M., Olson G. | Does the market perceive a difference in rating agencies? | 60 |
| Jacobsen J.P. | Labor force participation | 58 |
| Blau F.D., Kahn L.M. | Analyzing the gender pay gap | 58 |
| White W.D. | Physicians and the changing health care marketplace | 58 |
| Elyasiani E., Zadeh A.H.M. | Econometric tests of alternative scale variables in money demand in open economies | 58 |
| Gilkeson J.H., Porter G.E., Smith S.D. | The impact of the early withdrawal option on time deposit pricing | 57 |
| Albelda R. | Women and poverty: Beyond earnings and welfare | 57 |
| Goh J.C., Ederington L.H. | Cross-Sectional Variation in the Stock Market Reaction to Bond Rating Changes | 53 |
| Source: ECONbase. | ||
Other electronic initiatives to serve QREF's authors to disseminate their work are:
ScienceDirect is a Web platform for STM research used widely by academic institutions, libraries and corporations. Benefits include:
The QREF is also included in ScienceDirect. There were over 2500 requests for QREF full text articles during the period of January–August 2000.
Contents Alert Economics is an e-mail service alerting readers to published articles in 64
economic journals published by Elsevier/North-Holland. In weekly instalments, it
provides full titles, authors with their affiliations, keywords, JEL classifications, volume,
issue and page numbers for easy retrieval or the full article. Started early in 1994, the
service now has over 18,000 subscribers. The QREF's contents are also included.
7. The future | Top |
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The QREF enters the new millennium on a very strong foundation. The journal has a sound niche in its source of authorship and its readership. The QREF has had many changes in the past decade that are reviewed above. The most notable changes on the editorial side of the journal are the regular and frequent publication of special issues and the introduction of focus areas in each issue. Most notable on the production side of the journal is our linkage to Elsevier/North-Holland and the multitude of services they bring to the journal. The various resources we have enumerated bring enhanced exposure to QREF and the authors of its articles. The underlying goal for each of the changes has been to enhance the quality of the content of the articles published in the journal.
A critical factor in achieving and maintaining the high quality of QREF rests in the quality of the Editorial Board. The members of the Editorial Board have outstanding academic reputations. Members of the Editorial Board are called upon to contribute to the betterment of the journal in a number of capacities. First and foremost, they provide advice to the co-editors. Second, they regularly serve as referees of manuscripts. Third, they publicize the journal among their colleagues and students, which leads to high quality manuscripts being submitted to the journal. Fourth, they have been a source of ideas and, sometimes, served as editors of special issues and focus areas. As members revolve off the board, we continue to find replacements that will further enhance the quality of the journal. We are sure that the past editors of QREF join us in thanking everyone who has served or continues to serve as a member of the Editorial Board.
We see the future of the QREF as being very bright. Sponsorship by the University of Illinois, affiliation with MEA and MFA, and production by North-Holland are major reasons for optimism. As always, our most important goal is the dissemination of the highest quality research possible. All of the editors associated with QREF will continue their efforts with this in mind. Further, we are part of the electronic age and plan to expand our ability to fulfill our goal of disseminating the results of high quality and important economic and financial research to the world.
Richard J. Arnould
Acknowledgements | Top |
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We would like to express our thanks to a number of people who have participated in the construction of this special issue. Akbar Mustafa, Eric Christensen and Sherrilyn Billger spent many hours classifying the early articles and bringing all articles under the current JEL classification system. A special thanks goes to Martha Green and Marla Osterbur for dedicated hours spent coordinating the entire activity.