<i>Contemporary Economic Policy</i> 2024 Editor's Report

cycle to be approximately 15%, slightly higher than last year's acceptance rate of 13%.An important contribution to enhancing the quality of the journal is the refereeing process.CEP uses a double-blind process with the goal of obtaining three referee reports for each manuscript.As the bottom panel of Table 2 demonstrates we continue to make a significant effort to contact referees and ensure that the editorial team has well-grounded input in order to make informed decisions about submitted manuscripts.During 2024 CEP received just 254 referee reports from 491 reports requested.Nonetheless, these reports provided constructive input to improve accepted manuscripts as well as input for authors of rejected manuscripts.The average time between referee invitation and report submission was roughly 28 days.Identifying willing referees continues to be an important challenge in providing timely feedback to authors.Again, during 2024 CEP received only 254 referee reports, or 52% of the 491 total requests for reports sent.This response rate is lower than the response rate in 2023, 54%.This low rate of completed reports remains a troubling trend seen throughout the discipline.These numbers indicate that we continue to have difficulty identifying individuals who are willing and able to review for the journal.I again urge readers to accept referee requests when appropriate as time spent locating willing referees adversely affects turnaround time at all journals in the discipline.Table 3 shows individuals who generously provided their time as referees for the journal in 2024.I am especially grateful to the 33 individuals who wrote more than one report in 2024.Thank you all!The time to decision for submitting authors is a critical variable for most journals but is particularly important for CEP since the journal's objective is to inform current policy debate.The editorial team places an extremely high priority on minimizing the time to first editorial decision so that important contributions to the policy debates