Methodology
Tier is derived from the record, never typed in by hand. This page publishes the rule and shows its output for every conference currently listed, so a disagreement can be about whether an input is wrong rather than about taste.
Two axes
Both are recorded independently, and the tier is computed from them. Neither is a quality score on its own: a narrow meeting can be excellent, and a broad one can be weak.
Scope — how wide the audience is
generalfieldregionallocal
Selectivity — how hard it is to get on the programme
invitedhighly_selectiverefereedopen
Organiser type
associationresearch_institutecentral_bankuniversitygovernmentcommercial
The rules, in order
The first matching rule decides the tier. Order matters: the floors are applied before anything can promote a listing.
- Open submission → tier 3. If everyone who registers can present, there is no selection to speak of, whoever runs it.
- Commercially organised → tier 3. A hard ceiling. A for-profit organiser cannot reach tier 1 or 2 however selective it claims to be.
- Local scope → tier 3. Single-institution or single-city audiences.
- Tier 1a. General scope, invited or highly selective, run by an association, research institute or central bank.
- Tier 1b. Field scope, invited or highly selective, serious organiser, and discussants. Discussants are the marker of a genuine research conference rather than a presentation slot.
- Tier 2. Genuinely refereed, general/field or regional audience.
- Otherwise tier 3.
Invitation-only meetings are excluded
This directory lists conferences an economist can apply to. A meeting assembled purely by invitation has no call for papers and nothing to submit, so it is not listed — however strong it is. That is a scope decision about this directory, not a judgement about the meeting.
The NBER Summer Institute, the ECB Forum on Central Banking (Sintra), the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium and NBER Macroeconomics Annual are all excluded on these grounds. Validation rejects any record marked invited, so this is enforced rather than remembered.
Predatory-conference signal
A for-profit organiser running an open-submission event with no refereeing is the standard predatory pattern. It is flagged on the listing rather than quietly removed — you can judge it yourself, which is the point.
- High — commercial organiser, open submission, not refereed.
- Watch — commercial organiser, everything else.
- None — any non-commercial organiser.
No conference currently listed has a commercial organiser, so nothing carries this flag today. The rule is published anyway: it is the check this directory exists to make, and it should be legible before it fires rather than after.
Every listing, and why
The inputs and the derived result for all 15 conferences currently listed. The reason column is the rule that fired, printed straight from the code that assigns tiers.
| Conference | Scope | Selectivity | Organiser | Tier | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allied Social Science Associations Annual Meeting | general | highly_selective | association | Tier 1 | General-interest meeting, highly selective, major organiser |
| European Economic Association Annual Congress | general | highly_selective | association | Tier 1 | General-interest meeting, highly selective, major organiser |
| Central Banking Economic Modelling Frontiers | field | refereed | central_bank | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| CEPR European Summer Symposium in International Macroeconomics | field | refereed | research_institute | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Conference on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Economics, Finance, and Central Banking | field | refereed | central_bank | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Conference on Macro-Finance Research | field | refereed | central_bank | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Czech National Bank Workshop on Financial Stability and Macroprudential Policy | field | refereed | central_bank | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| DNB Annual Research Conference | field | refereed | central_bank | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Econometric Society World Congress | general | refereed | association | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Joint Bank of Greece / ECB Workshop | field | refereed | central_bank | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Macroeconomic Policies with Heterogeneous Agents | field | refereed | research_institute | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Pacific Basin Research Conference | field | refereed | central_bank | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Royal Economic Society Annual Conference | general | refereed | association | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Sailing the Macro Workshop | field | refereed | university | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
| Society for Economic Dynamics Annual Meeting | field | refereed | association | Tier 2 | Refereed, international audience |
Think something is wrong?
Check the inputs in the table above first. If an input is wrong — the scope, the selectivity, whether there are discussants — that is a data fix, and the tier follows automatically. If the inputs are right and the tier still looks wrong, the rule is what needs to change, and that argument is worth having in the open.
Everything here lives in git. Records are plain JSON files and every change is a reviewable diff.