In 1985, the first Council of the European Economic Association (EEA) addressed the issue of how best to set up an Association journal. At that time, it was feared that a new journal would not be viable and the advantages of linking up with an existing journal seemed obvious. Hence, the EEA Council decided to enter into an agreement with Elsevier, who had been publishing The European Economic Review (EER) since 1969 and continues to own and publish it today, and designated the EER as its official journal, with effect from Volume 30, 1986.
From 1986, the EER improved steadily in quality. The link with the EEA gave it automatic circulation to all individual EEA members; this link also guaranteed supplies of high-quality papers from the annual EEA Congress and the International Seminar on Macroeconomics, as well as a mechanism for attracting top-quality editors. The quality improvement was reflected in a steady increase in the EER's impact factor. Recent studies suggest that the EER is securely within the top-twenty economics journals worldwide.
However, these successes could not compensate for the anomalous situation whereby a large and increasingly successful professional association did not own its own journal. Dissatisfaction at Elsevier's pricing policies also persisted, and was highlighted by the adverse publicity arising from Ted Bergstrom's study (published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in Fall 2001), showing the EER to be in another top-twenty list: Bergstroms "Rogue's Gallery" of the most expensive journals to institutions.
In the light of these concerns, the Executive and Council of the EEA decided to terminate the agreement with Elsevier, meaning that the EER ceased to be the official journal of the EEA as of January 1, 2003. After extensive negotiations and a competitive bidding process, the EEA decided to launch a new journal, the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA), published for the EEA by MIT Press from early 2003. The EEA also decided to further raise the quality of its journal by making the JEEA a truly global outlet for the best research in economics, competing for top articles with the five leading journals in the field.

Developments 2009/2010:

In 2009, the journal underwent a number of changes: Fabrizio Zilibotti took over from Xavier Vives the editorship of the journal (General Editor). Stefano DellaVigna replaced Orazio Attanasio as Editor. The current editorial team consists of Marios Angeletos (MIT), Fabio Canova (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Stefano DellaVigna (UC Berkeley) and Fabrizio Zilibotti (University of Zurich).

The current editorial team is committed to promote further the success of the journal and to provide a good service to the EEA and the profession. Our goal is to establish JEEA as a leading general-audience journal. We want to achieve this goal by attracting the best papers in all fields and provide an efficient editorial service. In particular, we are strongly committed to a faster editorial process. We can already provide some tangible results of this effort.  In the period January 1^st-August 31^st 2009 we received 250 new submissions (400 new submissions over the entire year). The average time for a first decision to such new submissions was shorter than three months. Only 5 papers out of 250 were still pending as of December 31^st 2009. We solicited 27 revisions, and 2 papers already reached final acceptance before the end of 2009. We are committed to keep and possibly improve further our turnaround performance. This effort relies on the decisive support of a great pool of associated editors and loyal referees which many of you are part of.

JEEA invites submissions in all area of economics, and promotes high-quality research without any methodological or affiliation bias. We have a very diverse editorial team covering a wide range of expertise including applied econometrics, behavioral economics, economic growth and development, economic theory, experimental economics, financial economics, macroeconomics, organization theory, political economy. We have an even farther-reaching pool of expertise among our associate editors. Several papers published in JEEA have become “classical” contribution with over 500 Google Scholar citations. The impact factor of the journal has increased by 50% in 2008 (for papers published in 2006-07) as compared with 2007 (for papers published in 2005-06). More changes will take place in 2011. The journal will switch to a new publisher and a new format. Each volume will consist of six regular issues. We will discontinue the publication of the proceedings of the EEA Congress. The main lectures will continue to be published in one of the regular issues.