Are American astrophysics papers accepted more quickly than others?

It has been shown that papers in stem cell research submitted from institutions in the USA are accepted faster than those submitted from elsewhere and that the cause might at least partly be some bias in the refereeing process. We investigate whether there is a similar difference in time scale for papers in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology and look briefly at some of the possible causes. We find a publication time lag of 3.8 days (out of a median time of 105 days) while in the stem cell case it is 24 days out of a median of 83 days. One of many possible causes is a difference in how useful the papers are to the community, and we will assess this in a second paper making use of citation analysis.