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Use when anticipating the objections a sophisticated American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (AEJ: Applied) referee will raise, so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission or addresses them in revision. Plans the defense; it does not draft the response letter (aeja-rebuttal) or run the submission preflight (aeja-submission).
Passed 17 of 22 test cases with the skill, and 3 of 22 without it.
and 19 more in the full report
17 fixed0 passed either way2 still failing3 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 17 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
Our AEJ: Applied submission features 25 separate specification checks, alternative subgroup cuts, functional form variations, and placebo tests. Coauthors want to include all 25 tables in the main text to prove complete robustness. Review this presentation strategy using the mandatory bracketed section format.
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| The output includes the bracketed section header 【Robustness placement】. | Missed | Passed |
| The response advises placing decisive primary robustness checks in the main paper while moving secondary checks to the online appendix to maintain readability. | Passed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
AEJ: Applied uses single-blind review through the AEA ScholarOne system: author identities are visible to referees, while referee identities remain anonymous to authors. An editor assigns the paper to a coeditor or handles it directly, and before a first R&R the handling coeditor consults a second coeditor. Referees here are identification-literate applied microeconomists; the modal report attacks the credibility of the design first, then magnitude/mechanism, then external validity. The editor weighs whether the contribution is novel and the design clears the bar. Plan to pre-empt the predictable objections in the paper itself, leaving the response letter for genuinely new asks.
| Referee objection (by design) | Pre-emption to build in now |
|---|---|
| "TWFE is biased under staggered timing" | heterogeneity-robust estimator + Bacon decomposition already in the paper |
| "Parallel trends is not credible" | clean pre-trend leads + honest-DID sensitivity bound |
| "Instrument is not excludable" | institutional + theoretical exclusion argument + falsification tests |
| "RD jump is manipulation / bandwidth-driven" | density test + bandwidth sensitivity + donut |
| "Effect is just selection / confounding" | Oster δ / coefficient-stability bounds |
| "Local/ITT effect ≠ the policy-relevant effect" | explicit estimand + calibrated external-validity discussion |
| "Inference too narrow (few clusters)" | wild-cluster bootstrap / randomization inference |
| "Mechanism is a black box" | a test that distinguishes the proposed channel from rivals |
| "Not reproducible" | the openICPSR package built and referenced (aeja-replication-package) |
The shared, venue-neutral objection catalog is in
../../resources/README.md(links to the empirical-methods hub) — walk it before drafting.
test cases passed, vs 3 / 22 without
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