Secrets of Economics Editors

9. Reflections on Being a Journal Editor

9 Journal editors serve as gate keepers for any academic discipline because journals are important vehicles for the spreading of ideas and information within the discipline. For many disciplines, they provide indicia of the professional standing of faculty at colleges and universities. These characteristics of journals are probably more important for the economics discipline than for some other disciplines because books are less important for economics than for some other disciplines. So what does it take to be an editor of an economics journal? What do editors do, and how do they do it? What do they think and feel? What philosophy guides them? After reading all of the chapters in this book, the reader should have a better idea of the answers to these questions. In this chapter, I offer my take on them. My Background and My Editorships My Background I was trained as an industrial organization (IO) economist, receiving my Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1969. I spent fifteen months working abroad in Pakistan and Indonesia and then taught as an assistant professor in Princeton University’s economics department from 1970 to 1976. In the fall of 1976, I moved to New York University’s Graduate School of Business Administration (now the Stern School of Business) and its economics department, where I have been ever since. During my years at NYU, I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to have served in the U.S. government three times. From 1978 to 1979, I served on the senior staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where my responsibility was primarily in the environmental and other microeconomics-oriented regulatory area. From Reflections on Being a Journal Editor Lawrence J. White 150 Lawrence J. White 1982 to 1983, I served as the chief economist of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where I managed a staff of forty economists, who provided the economics input into the division’s investigations and prosecutions of antitrust cases. Finally, from November 1986 through August 1989, I was one of three board members on the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), which was the agency that regulated the savings and loan (S&L) industry and that also provided deposit insurance for S&Ls. At that time, the S&L industry was recognized as facing severe financial difficulties, so I received a quick, firsthand immersion in the nuances and difficulties of financial regulation and in the realities of asymmetric information in financial services and financial regulation. The FHLBB position led me to a new field of research—financial services regulation—that I have continued to pursue, alongside my older interests in IO and its policy applications in antitrust and other regulatory areas. My Editorships At various times in my professional career, I have served as a journal editor. From 1984 to 1987 and again from 1990 to 1995, I was the North American Editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics. In the summer of 2004, I began serving as the General Editor of the Review of Industrial Organization, a position that (as of the summer of 2013) I still hold. In the fall of 1983, just after I had returned to NYU from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, a friend asked me whether I might be interested in joining with another friend to enter a bid to take over the editorial responsibilities of the Bell Journal of Economics (BJE), which had been a product of the Bell Laboratories economics group since 1970. In the wake of the antitrust division’s 1982 consent decree with American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) to break up the company, the journal would be transferred to the RAND Corporation in 1984. This transfer had the collateral consequences of greatly reducing the support for economists and economics at AT&T (and the Bell Labs). After some thought, I decided not to explore the possibilities of proceeding further. I did not have a strong vision of how to run a journal, and the magnitude of the BJE’s operations seemed daunting.1 In the spring of 1984, however, I was approached by the North American editorial board of the Journal of Industrial Economics to find out whether I would be interested in taking the position of Managing Reflections on Being a Journal Editor 151 Editor (U.S.) of the JIE. The previous Managing Editor, H. Michael Mann, had recently died, and a replacement was needed (and no one on the editorial...