Where to submit your paper?

The BE Press has just published this article that considers a model of the choice of where to submit an academic paper.

This is certainly something that authors spend a lot of time thinking about, and co-authors spend a lot of time emailing about on papers with multiple authors. Left out from the model here are editors. I find that I often write papers with specific editors in mind, and submit them to journals with specific editors in mind.

That editors matter provides an edge both to more senior scholars, who are more likely to know or at least have experience with a given editor, and to scholars at top fifty departments, from which editors tend to be drawn, for the same reason.