Jole review process

Review Process (jole-review-process)

When to trigger

• You are unsure whether JOLE is double-blind (it is not) and how that changes the submission
• You need to budget for the submission fee and understand when the decision is released
• You want to know what labor-economics referees and editors look for before you submit
• You are calibrating expectations for an R&R versus a reject

How JOLE review works

• Single-blind (single-anonymized). Referees are anonymous, but they know the authors' identities. Because of this the manuscript is not anonymized: it begins with a title page naming all co-authors, their institutions, and emails, and references are not blinded. Do not strip identifying material — that is correct for double-blind journals but wrong here.
• Submission via Editorial Manager (editorialmanager.com/jole), with a cover letter. JOLE is the official journal of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) and is published by the University of Chicago Press.
• Non-refundable submission fee (since July 1, 2018): $100 for SOLE members, $175 for non-members. It is charged even if the paper is desk-rejected, and the decision is not released until the fee is paid — so the fee gates your result, not just your submission. SOLE membership is the cheaper path.
• Publication-ethics regime: UChicago Press / COPE guidelines, with explicit attention to confidential data and research on vulnerable / human subjects. Flag proprietary data or human-subjects concerns up front.
• Review clock: do not promise the author a specific turnaround time; this pack has no current official review-clock source encoded.
• Editor: the current Editor-in-Chief is Peter Kuhn, UC Santa Barbara. Confirm the live board page before naming any editor or conflict in a cover letter.

What labor referees expect

JOLE referees are labor economists judging a general-interest labor audience. They reward:

1. A first-order labor question (wages/earnings, employment, human capital, labor supply/demand, family, discrimination, unions, migration, institutions/policy) that matters beyond one niche.
2. Credible identification matched to labor data (DID / event study with modern estimators, IV including shift-share, RDD at eligibility thresholds, RCTs, AKM firm–worker designs).
3. Disciplined data work — appropriate sample construction from CPS/ACS/registers, correct standard errors, robustness that a labor referee would otherwise demand.
4. A replicable empirical core — JOLE publishes empirical/simulation/experimental papers only if data are documented and available, with deposit to the JOLE Dataverse after acceptance (see jole-replication-and-data-policy).
5. Word economy — the ~20,000-word soft cap (full-page exhibit = 500 words) signals that referees value a tightly argued paper, not a sprawling one.

Checklist

• Manuscript is non-anonymized (single-blind): title page names all authors
• Submission fee budgeted; you know the decision is withheld until it is paid
• SOLE membership considered (lower fee)
• Proprietary-data / human-subjects issues flagged to the editor at submission
• Identification and robustness pre-empt the obvious labor-referee objections
• Live board checked before naming an editor or conflict

Anti-patterns

• Treating JOLE as double-blind and stripping author identity from the manuscript
• Forgetting the fee blocks the decision, then being surprised no result arrives
• Promising a specific review turnaround
• Naming an editor or conflict without checking the live board page
• Submitting an empirical paper with no plan to make the data available

Output format

【Review model】single-blind, manuscript NOT anonymized [confirmed Y/N]
【Fee】$100 SOLE / $175 non-member, non-refundable, gates the decision [budgeted Y/N]
【Society】SOLE membership considered for lower fee [Y/N]
【Ethics】proprietary data / human subjects flagged [Y/N/NA]
【Referee readiness】labor question + identification + replication ready [Y/N each]
【Next step】jole-submission preflight

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — official JOLE URLs, source evidence, and live-check items
• ../../resources/external_tools.md — labor data sources and packages