Reviews of Economic Literature

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Reviews of Economic Literature

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Stanford University Press (SUP) and Public Knowledge Project (SUP+PKP) announce the launch of the first journal in their open access program, Reviews of Economic Literature, which is accepting submissions now.

Reviews of Economic Literature (REL) is a peer reviewed journal that publishes articles on developments across the field of economics for economists and other interested readers. It is a Diamond Open Access journal (without fees for authors or readers) owned by an editorial nonprofit and published by Stanford University Press.

Subject areas include economics, econometrics, economic history, financial economics, business economics, and accounting.

The editors invite and encourage economists to consider preparing syntheses of recent research, bibliometric reviews, meta-analyses, and other forms of coverage for all aspects of the economic literature for submission to REL. Prospective authors are invited to register and submit work at https://rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/rel/about/submissions

Four distinguished professors of economics lead the Reviews of Economic Literature editorial team:

• Iris Claus, University of Waikato
• Pascal Courty, University of Victoria
• Les Oxley, University of Waikato and Curtin University
• Roberto Veneziani, Queen Mary University of London, and member of the AHE management committee

The editorial team, having gained invaluable journal experience working with scholar-authors and reviewers for a large publisher, decided to found a new journal that is based on the highest principles of editorial integrity and published from within the academic community.

“We envision Reviews of Economic Literature as part of a movement to restore scholarly publishing to the priorities and values of the academic community,” the editors say. “Open access as implemented by commercial publishers has, we believe, led to unintended consequences that serve neither researchers, academic institutions, policy makers, nor society in general. REL is a nonprofit, academic led, open access publication, free for authors and readers, with content immediately available upon publication.”

With 133 years of success publishing scholarly books, Stanford University Press has entered journal publishing to advance the academic community’s access to high quality research without author or reader fees. SUP is working with the Public Knowledge Project, a Stanford and Simon Fraser University developer of widely used open-source publishing platforms, and is drawing on the support of university libraries and funders, including the Gates Foundation, which are deeply invested in open access publishing models.

Alan Harvey, director of SUP, notes that additional journals will soon be announced and is pleased that REL is the first in what promises to be an exciting new scholar-focused journals program from the Press.

“I’m thrilled that PKP is able to work closely with Stanford University Press, as well as with this editorial team” says John Willinsky, PKP founder and Stanford’s Khosla Family Professor Emeritus, “in another of the Project’s efforts to increase public and scholarly access to, in the case of Reviews of Economic Literature, critical overviews and analyses of developments in economic literature.”

Stanford University Press publishes 140 books a year across the humanities, social sciences, law, and business. These books inform scholarly debate, generate global and cross-cultural discussion, and bring timely, peer-reviewed scholarship to the wider reading public. At the leading edge of both print and digital dissemination of innovative research, with about 4,000 books currently in print, SUP is a publisher of ideas that matter, books that endure.

The Public Knowledge Project is a Core Facility of Simon Fraser University that has, since 1998, been developing open-source (free) publishing platforms, providing publishing services to journals and publishers, and conducting scholarly communication research, all to improve access to research and scholarship. PKP’s work is financed by its services, memberships, and grants, with its open-source software benefiting from the larger community’s contributions.

To learn more about participation in SUP’s new journals series, reach out to John Willinsky, willinsk@stanford.edu

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Decolonizing Economics: Book Launch

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Decolonizing Economics: Book Launch

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Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction

by Devika Dutt, Carolina Alves, Surbhi Kesar, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

Decolonization has long been debated across the social sciences, but the economics discipline has so far avoided such critical engagement. This book provides a much-needed intervention. Dutt, Alves, Kesar, and Kvangraven uncover the deeply Eurocentric foundations that shape how economists study the world today. These have rendered the discipline ill-equipped to tackle critical questions, such as structural racism, uneven development, the climate crisis, labour relations, and how structural power shapes economic outcomes. Decolonizing economics entails challenging the norms of neutrality and objectivity that economists claim to speak from, while fostering alternative ways of understanding the economy that take seriously structural power relations and contemporary processes of economic development. Readers will come to understand the political stakes of decolonization and the wide range of scholarship that already exists that can help us grasp economics from non-Eurocentric perspectives. Through such scholarship, we can gain an enriched understanding of capitalism and its relationship to exploitation, colonialism, and racialization.

You can purchase the book or e-book at the Polity Press website.

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Table of contents

About the authors

Devika Dutt is Lecturer in Development Economics at King’s College London, and member of the AHE management committee.
Carolina Alves is Associate Professor in Economics at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) at University College London, and a Fellow in Economics at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
Surbhi Kesar is Senior Lecturer in Economics at SOAS, University of London, and former member of the AHE management committee.
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is Senior Lecturer in International Development at King’s College London, and member of the AHE management committee.

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Book launch in London

Tuesday, July 8th 2025 at 6:30-9pm 

Marx Memorial Library & Workers School, 37A Clerkenwell Green London EC1R 0DU

Join us for the launch of Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction, a timely and thought-provoking new book that challenges dominant economic paradigms and explores alternative frameworks.

This special event will feature a discussion with the authors, who will share insights into the book’s central themes, the motivations behind their work, and the importance of a decolonization agenda for reimagining economics. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A session, offering attendees the opportunity to engage directly with the authors.

The evening will conclude with a wine reception, providing a chance to connect with fellow attendees and continue the conversation in a relaxed and convivial setting.

All are welcome. Admission is free, but space is limited—please RSVP to secure your place. Door open at 18:30, discussion will begin at 19:00. 

Important note about the venue: The building presents several significant accessibility challenges for individuals with mobility impairments. There are no step-free or wheelchair-accessible toilet facilities available within the building. The only ground floor toilet, which is gender-neutral, is accessed via three steps. Additionally, the women’s toilet is located on a mid-level floor and is only accessible by a flight of stairs. These conditions fall short of current best practices for accessibility and may significantly hinder access for individuals with disabilities.

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Photos from the book launch

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2025 Fred Lee Prize Winners

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2025 Fred Lee Early Career Prize Recipients

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Blanca L. Navarro (University of Granada, Spain) and Josephine D. Baker (New School for Social Research, United States) received the 2025 Fred Lee Early Career Prize, which awards papers submitted by early career scholars for the AHE annual conference.

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INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND THE NEW ACCUMULATION REGIME (1993–2023): THE SPANISH CASE

Blanca L. Navarro

Navarro applies Regulation Theory to Spain’s institutional and economic trajectory from 1982 to 2023. Her research highlights that Spain’s development model has been shaped by the dominant neoclassical ideology of EU institutions, producing economic policy continuity across political parties. Even prior to the 2007/08 crisis, institutional reforms established a new regime characterised by the financial sector’s dominance, weakened fiscal capacity, privatised strategic sectors, stagnating productivity, declining labour conditions, and wealth inequality. Despite successive crises (GFC, Eurozone debt crisis, Covid-19, cost-of-living crisis), the basic institutional and neoliberal structure has persisted, resulting in structurally high unemployment and exclusion. Navarro thus argues that tackling current macroeconomic and social challenges requires acknowledging the limits of mainstream economic thinking and overcoming Europe’s intellectual rigidity.

Blanca Lozano Navarro is a PhD student in Economics at the University of Granada, affiliated with the Research Group on Economic History, Institutions, and Development. Her dissertation draws on institutional and heterodox approaches—particularly Regulation Theory—to examine the evolution of the European Union’s mode of development. Her research focuses on political-economic transformations, with special attention to capital–labour relations, fiscal systems, market dynamics, the role of the state, and international integration. Committed to an interdisciplinary and critical perspective, she seeks to expose how neoliberal institutional arrangements undermine democratic sovereignty and economic justice, while advocating for a renewed welfare project grounded in solidarity and equality.

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THE ECONOMICS OF INTANGIBLE CONCENTRATION: POWER LAWS, INTANGIBLE ASSETS, AND INTELLECTUAL MONOPOLY

Josephine D. Baker

Baker investigates theories of knowledge monopolisation and market competition by analysing intangible-related firm attributes across Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Spain (2018–2022). She explores whether intangible assets tend to concentrate disproportionately among a small number of firms. Despite the short period of observation, she finds no significant increase in the concentration of intangible assets or intangible-to-tangible ratios. However, her results support the idea that intangible assets follow different market dynamics and display stable patterns across countries, years, and firm sizes, suggesting a persistent underlying mechanism favouring intangible intensity and potential monopoly-like tendencies.

Josephine Baker is a PhD student in Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York city, USA. Josephine specialises in the economics of knowledge and information, quantitative political economy, and data visualisation. Josephine is one of the coordinators of the Quantitative Political Economy stream in the AHE.

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Click here for the list of previous winners of the annual Fred Lee prize for early career scholars.

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Ranking Heterodox Economics Journals: A New Approach

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Ranking Heterodox Economics Journals: A New Approach

by José Alejandro Coronado and Roberto Veneziani

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There is growing concern about the increasing emphasis on journal rankings in academia. This is of special consequence in economics: given theoretical and methodological cleavages, heterodox outlets tend to be marginalised in traditional ranking systems.

Despite this, journal rankings are used and may indeed be useful. In a recent paper, we explored how to build a ranking that appropriately reflects the reputation of heterodox economics journals amongst heterodox economists (Coronado and Veneziani, 2025).

We are not the first ones to build rankings for heterodox economics journals. Fred Lee and others (e.g., Lee et al., 2010; Cronin, 2020) developed heterodox economics journal rankings based on subjective peer evaluations combined with bibliometric indicators. These composite “quality” indices had the objective of measuring research quality in the heterodox economics community.

In contrast, we measure reputation and intellectual influence within the heterodox economics community by focusing exclusively on bibliometric indicators. Thus, we capture the views of the heterodox economics community through their citation choices.

To build our ranking we require, first, a tool to rank journals based on bibliometric data. We adopt the Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004) (PV) index — a theoretically-founded measure of intellectual influence within citation networks. Unlike simple citation counts or impact factors, the PV index accounts for both the quantity and the prestige of citations received, capturing the recursive structure of intellectual influence.

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From a Broad Set of Journals to the Core

Second, we need to identify the set of journals to rank. This is easier said than done, lacking a clear, widely shared notion of heterodox or even heterodox-adjacent outlets. We begin by focusing on a comprehensive list of journals: we start from the set of outlets used in the influential study by Lee et al. (2010) and add a range of additional journals identified in more recent contributions (e.g., Gräbner et al., 2018; Kapeller and Springholz, 2016). After excluding outlets with missing citation data, our database covers 119 journals and over half a million citations between 2000 and 2023.

While we do derive a ranking of this large set of journals based on the PV index (Table 1 in the paper), a closer look at the structure of the citation network raises some doubts on all rankings that focus on broad, comprehensive definitions of heterodox economics. For, the network structure is extremely sparse: journals form internally cohesive groups, but these groups barely cite each other. Indeed, the network effectively splits into two almost disconnected subnetworks. It is unclear that these journals bear a sufficiently close family resemblance to rank them together.

To overcome this problem, we follow an inductive approach: we use community detection techniques to let the citation data reveal which journals are actively part of the heterodox intellectual conversation, and we identify a tightly connected group of 14 journals, which we term the Heterodox Economics Core.

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The Restricted Ranking: Results and Interpretation

The first table below (Table 3 in the paper) presents the ranking of the Heterodox Economics Core, using the PV index based on citations from the past five years.

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Several things are worth noting: The Review of Keynesian Economics, founded only in 2012, ranks first, indicating its remarkable rise in influence within the heterodox community. Established journals such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Metroeconomica and the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics remain highly ranked. Journals like the Review of Radical Political Economics and Journal of Economic Issues rank lower than might be expected based on informal reputations.

Perhaps surprisingly, some outlets often associated with heterodox economics — such as Feminist Economics and Review of Social Economy — do not belong to the Heterodox Economics Core. Our community detection analysis shows that they belong to a separate cluster — which we call Social Economics and Inequality — with relatively weak citation links to the Heterodox Economics Core. Nevertheless, given their relevance in the community, we build an extended ranking that includes these outlets, and the other journals in their cluster, in addition to the core 14 journals.

The expanded ranking is shown in the table below (Table A1 in the paper) and it is immediately evident that the addition of these journals does not make a major difference.

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Beyond the static ranking, Figure 2 in the paper traces the evolution of journal influence (for journals in the Heterodox Economics Core) from 2008 to 2023. It shows that significant shifts have occurred: RoKE has steadily gained ground, while the influence of Cambridge Journal of Economics, Metroeconomica, Review of Political Economy, and Journal of Post Keynesian Economics has somewhat declined over time.

These results are quite striking. Due to the strong network externalities in citation communities, one would expect that over time established journals cement their position as central nodes in the network, reinforcing their influence through cumulative advantage. Yet, the data reveal a more dynamic landscape within heterodox economics, where newer journals can rise rapidly, and established outlets can lose ground — suggesting that intellectual leadership in the field remains actively contested rather than ossified.

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References:

• Coronado, J.A. and Veneziani, R. (2025). “Heterodox Economics Journals: A Network Analysis.” Metroeconomica.
• Cronin, B. (2020). “Journal Rankings and Heterodox Economics.” Journal of Economic Issues.
• Gräbner, C., et al. (2018). “Towards a Pluralist Ranking of Heterodox Economics Journals.” Review of Political Economy.
• Kapeller, J. and Springholz, F. (2016). Directory of Heterodox Economics Journals (6th ed.).
• Lee, F.S., et al. (2010). “Research Quality Rankings of Heterodox Economic Journals.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology.
• Palacios-Huerta, I. and Volij, O. (2004). “The Measurement of Intellectual Influence.” Econometrica.

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