The Revenue of Finance Journals: Networks, Pricing Power, and Publication Volume (opens in new tab)

I study commercial revenue at 26 finance journals over 1999-2025, exploiting the creation of the Elsevier Finance Journal Ecosystem (a formal network of coordinated journals planned in 2019 and launched in 2020) as a quasi-natural experiment. Using synthetic control as the primary identification strategy, I find that ecosystem membership generated a projected long-run commercial revenue effect of approximately \$59 million in real 2024 USD, ...