CEPR has decided to launch a new online peer-reviewed review to disseminate emerging scholarly work on the Covid-19 epidemic. Very quickly after the onset of the epidemic a large number of policy papers have been written by economic scholars, many of which have appeared on VoxEU. This has been enormously helpful to improve our understanding of policy options. The next step requires more formal investigations, based on explicit theory and/or empirical evidence. This is what Covid Economics:A Real-Time Journal (CEJ) aims to provide.
Submissions will be promptly evaluated by the Editorial Board, over a maximum of 48 hours, on an accept/reject basis, i.e. no resubmission and no referee report. When a sufficient number of papers are accepted (3 to 5), an issue of the CEJ will be published online by CEPR Press. Thus the frequency of the review will be determined endogenously. We consider the journal to be a preprint, which is common in medicine where results have to be out quickly as input into the debate; it will still be possible to submit papers to a traditional journal at a later date.
