Academic journals in economics commonly take 3-6 months after manuscript submission to send the first response (reject, accept or revise) to the author. The variance of this response time is large both within and across journals. Authors prefer to receive quick responses, even if these are rejections, because then the article can be submitted to the next journal sooner. The quicker an article gets published, the sooner the author can use it to get a raise, a grant or tenure. This creates an incentive for authors to preferentially submit to journals with short response times.
If more articles are submitted to a journal, then the journal has a larger pool of research to select from. If the selection is positively correlated with article quality, then a journal with a larger pool to select from publishes on average higher quality articles. Higher quality raises the prestige of a journal’s editors. So there is an incentive for a journal to claim to have short response times to attract authors. On the other hand, procrastination of the referees and the editors tends to lengthen the actual response times. Many journals publish statistics about their response times on their website, but currently nothing guarantees the journals’ honesty. There are well-known tricks (other than outright lying) to shorten the reported response time, for example considering an article submitted only when it is assigned to an editor, and counting the response time from that point. Assigning to an editor can take over two weeks in my experience.
To keep journals honest, authors who have submitted to a journal should be able to check whether their papers have been correctly included in the statistics. Some authors may be reluctant to have their name and paper title associated with a rejection from a journal. A rejection may be inferred from a paper being included in the submission statistics, but not being published after a few years. A way around this is to report the response time for each manuscript number. Each submission to a journal is already assigned a unique identifier (manuscript number), which does not contain any identifying details of the author. The submitter of a paper is informed of its manuscript number, so can check whether the response time publicly reported for that manuscript number is correct.
Currently, authors can make public claims about the response time they encountered (e.g. on https://www.econjobrumors.com/journals.php), but these claims are hard to check. An author wanting to harm a journal may claim a very long response time. If the authors’ reported response times are mostly truthful, then these provide information about a journal’s actual response time. Symmetrically, if the journals’ reported response times are accurate, then an author’s truthfulness can be statistically tested, with the power of the test depending on the number of articles for which the author reports the response time.