VoxDev Submissions

We strongly encourage researchers to submit their rigorous development economics research which has relevant policy implications.

The majority of VoxDev articles are commissioned directly by the Editorial Board based on economic research identified by the VoxDev team. The Editorial Board meets each week to review research identified internally as well as papers that have been directly submitted. Given the enormous amount of research released each month in development economics, by submitting directly to VoxDev you push your paper to the top of the pile for consideration by the Editorial Board. 

Submit to VoxDev

Researchers interested in writing a “research-based policy analysis and commentary” should send us their research papers as attachments to [email protected]. Please do not draft an article before we have reviewed your paper – it will not improve your submission as the Editorial Board only considers the underlying research itself.

When you send a submission, please let us know what stage the paper is at, and whether it has been published, is R&R, or has been submitted to a journal.

As we only publish our articles once, we aim to wait until papers are more or less 'set' before featuring the results and takeaways on VoxDev. This means that if you submit a paper that is clearly an early draft, we will ask you to come back to us once the paper is at a later stage. It also means that we do not consider Job Market Papers until after the market has finished, once feedback from presentations has been incorporated.

The VoxDev Board meets weekly, and our aim is to get back to authors within a few weeks of their submission. 

Editorial Decisions

The decision on whether to commission a VoxDev piece based on any paper that is submitted to us is made by the whole Board of Editors. The Board weighs a few different things in their ultimate decision and is unfortunately unable to provide specific feedback on any specific submission given the number of papers it handles a week. However, we would like to be transparent about the things we weigh in making a decision. The VoxDev vision is to “bring cutting edge research to the forefront of decision making – for policymakers, the private sector, NGOs, the civil society, and everyone in between.” Given this, we think carefully about the broader implications of the research: what policy implications does it have? Of course, a lot of work in economics may not be directly relevant to policy but is valuable as it advances our current state of knowledge. That is crucially important research but does not fit our vision. We also weigh the innovation and quality of the work, especially if it makes causal statements, also in line with our vision of rigorous, cutting-edge research. Finally, we only publish work on developing countries and we do not publish opinion pieces.

The members of the Editorial Board are Martina Björkman-Nyqvist, Michael Callen, Stefano Caria and Cesi Cruz.

VoxDev Reprints

VoxDev wishes to encourage dissemination and is happy to permit reproduction of material, provided terms and conditions are met.  Please refer to our copyright and usage page for more detail, but the key conditions are:

• Explicit permission of both VoxDev and the author(s) should be sought before reprinting.
• No changes may be made to the material without prior consent from VoxDev and the author(s) of the piece.  
• Both VoxDev and the author(s) should be credited. The following suggested note must be included at the top of the column: “Reprinted by permission from VoxDev; Author(s)” with a hyperlink to the original article on VoxDev.
• No permission is needed for using VoxDev columns for teaching purposes. However, no changes must be made to the original publications.

All queries regarding permission to reprint to be addressed to [email protected]