The Revenue of Finance Journals: Networks, Pricing Power, and Publication Volume

Douglas Cumming

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: 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 \$54-\$59 million in real 2024 USD, comprising \$48 million in citation-mechanism-implied APC revenue and \$6-\$11 million in incremental submission-fee revenue (the submission-fee range reflects uncertainty about the share of extra submissions arriving via Elsevier's Article Transfer Service, which generates no incremental fee at the receiving journal). Of this total, approximately \$40-\$44 million is directly observed and realized through 2025 (a \$36 million synthetic-control gap on APC flow revenue plus \$4-\$8 million in incremental submission fees); the remaining \$14-\$15 million reflects standard submission-to-citation-to-revenue propagation lags from citation gains realized in 2019-2025 that are projected to materialize as publication revenue through approximately 2028. The effect is highly concentrated: four core journals (FRL, IRFA, IREF, RIBAF) account for 95% of the gain. Decomposing the revenue effect into intensive (price) and extensive (volume) margins, 89% comes from expanded publication volume; per-paper pricing power rose modestly if at all. The findings speak to the economics of coordinated networks in information-goods markets and to the industrial organization of scholarly publishing.

Date: 2025-08, Revised 2026-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14301 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2508.14301

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().