AER Workflow

AER Workflow

Overview

This is the router. It does not replace any specialized skill. It tells you which one to use next, and in what order.

Default assumption: unless the user names a different venue, the manuscript targets AER, AER: Insights, or an AEJ journal — not a finance journal, not a generic economics field journal, and not a working-paper repository.

When to Use

• The user asks "what should I work on next?"
• The user dumps a draft and you must decide where the bottleneck is
• The user asks for a full paper to be drafted end-to-end and you need the gate sequence
• The user is rotating between writing, empirics, and revision and loses track of which stage they are in
• A new reviewer report has arrived and the work mode must switch from drafting to rebuttal

Routing Map

Use:

• aer-topic-selection when the project is new, when the user is undecided between AER / Insights / an AEJ, or when the contribution sentence cannot be written in one line
• aer-literature when the closest papers must be mapped (novelty scan, antecedents paragraph) or when any citation needs verifying — for AI-drafted manuscripts, every citation
• aer-identification when the empirical design is the bottleneck — DiD, IV, RDD, SCM, shift-share, event study, RCT analysis
• aer-preregistration when the study runs a field/lab/survey experiment or collects primary data — write the pre-analysis plan, size the sample from a power/MDE calculation, and register with the AEA RCT Registry before the intervention
• aer-robustness when the main results exist but referee-anticipating checks (placebo, heterogeneity, mechanism, alternative samples) are missing or weak
• aer-paper-body when drafting or repairing the body sections — background, data, empirical strategy, results narration, magnitude interpretation, mechanisms, conclusion
• aer-introduction when drafting or rewriting the introduction, or when the abstract is over 100 words
• aer-tables-figures when regression tables are inconsistent, oversized, footnote-bloated, or do not match AER house style
• aer-consistency when the assembled manuscript needs the integrity audit — numbers vs. tables, sample sizes, conversions, cross-references, citation two-way match
• aer-referee-sim when a complete draft needs the adversarial desk screen and three simulated referee reports before submission
• aer-replication when preparing the AEA Data and Code Availability deposit, writing the README, or auditing reproducibility before acceptance
• aer-submission when running the final preflight before clicking submit — length, format, cover letter, conflicts
• aer-rebuttal when reviewer comments exist and a point-by-point response letter plus aligned manuscript edits are needed
• aer-statspai (optional engine) when the design is already fixed and the user wants to run the empirics from the agent — a unified Python API / MCP server covering DiD, IV, RDD, SCM, robustness, and table export. It executes what aer-identification chose; it does not replace that choice.

Default Sequence

For most empirical AER-track manuscripts, prefer this order:

1. aer-topic-selection — fix the contribution sentence and the target venue before anything else