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american-economic-review
GitHub用于评估经济学论文是否适合投稿至美国经济评论（AER）的辅助工具。涵盖期刊定位、选题匹配度、方法论与证据标准、写作风格及拒稿风险，帮助作者判断稿件契合度或决定目标期刊。
Trigger Scenarios
作者将AER列为目标或冲刺期刊
在AER与顶级专业期刊间做选择
需将领域性论文重构为全学科通用贡献
需要了解AER拒稿风险及替代期刊
Install
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill american-economic-review -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "american-economic-review",
"description": "Use when targeting American Economic Review (AER) or deciding whether an economics manuscript fits this venue. Encodes the journal's fit, framing, method-and-evidence bar, house style, official-submission re-check, and desk-reject heuristics."
}
American Economic Review (american-economic-review)
Journal positioning
AER is the flagship general-interest journal of the American Economic Association and one of the economics "top-5" (with QJE, JPE, Econometrica, REStud). It wants papers of broad interest to economists across fields, with a first-order question, a credible answer, and a result that changes how the profession thinks — not an incremental field paper. The audience is the whole discipline, so the contribution must read as important to someone outside your subfield.
A full lifecycle pack for AER ships separately as AER-skills (the aer-* skills). This profile is the quick fit / venue-selection layer; route into aer-workflow for step-by-step drafting and submission.
This skill is a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool. It does not replace the journal's current official submission guidelines. Before submitting, re-check the live author instructions on the AEA site or the editorial-manager submission system.
When to trigger
- The author names AER (or AER as a stretch target) as the venue.
- A paper has a clean research design and a question of general interest, and the author is choosing between AER and a top field journal.
- A strong field paper needs re-framing so the contribution reads as discipline-wide rather than niche.
- The author needs AER's desk-reject risks and a credible top-5 / top-field alternative list.
Scope & topic fit
- First-order questions across all fields of economics — micro, macro, labor, public, IO, trade, development, finance-adjacent — judged on general interest.
- Empirical papers with a transparent, defensible identification strategy.
- Theory papers whose results are general and consequential, not a narrow extension.
- Consider the sibling AEJs (
aej-applied-economics,aej-macroeconomics,aej-microeconomics,aej-economic-policy) and short-formataer-insightswhen the contribution is excellent but narrower than AER's general-interest bar.
Method & evidence bar
- Identification is the desk filter: naive TWFE on staggered treatment, weak or unjustified instruments, and RDD without density/covariate-smoothness evidence get rejected fast.
- Empirical work is expected to pre-empt the obvious threats (selection, measurement, confounders) with design, not hand-waving; modern DiD estimators, proper inference, and robustness are baseline.
- Structural and theory papers need clearly stated assumptions, identification of structural parameters, and results that generalize.
- Data and code transparency is mandatory; AEA enforces a data and code availability policy with verification.
Structure & house style
- The introduction must, in its first pages, state the question, the contribution, the approach, and the headline result — and say explicitly why a non-specialist should care.
- Make the marginal contribution non-overlapping: separate the theory/identification advance from the empirical finding from the policy reading.
- AER uses an unstructured abstract, JEL codes, and a tightly disciplined main text with online appendices for everything secondary.
- Exhibits are expected to be self-contained and publication-clean; the headline result should be legible from one table or figure.
Official-submission checklist
- Before giving submission-ready advice, read
../../resources/source-basis.mdand../../resources/official-source-map.md; start from the official source anchors for this journal family, then cite the current journal-specific page you checked. - Search the live site for "American Economic Review submission guidelines" and the AEA "Data and Code Availability Policy" and follow the current versions.
- Re-check submission fee, formatting, abstract/JEL requirements, anonymization expectations, and figure/table standards on the editorial-manager system.
- Re-check the current data/code deposit and verification workflow (openICPSR / AEA Data Editor) — this is enforced before acceptance.
- If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win.
Pre-submission self-check
- One sentence stating why an economist outside your field should care about this result.
- The contribution is stated as identification / theory / measurement, not as statistical significance.
- The introduction positions the paper against the current top-5 / top-field frontier on this question.
- Identification threats are addressed by design; inference and DiD/IV/RDD choices are state-of-the-art.
- Data and code are ready for the AEA availability + verification workflow.
Common desk-reject triggers
- A well-executed but narrow field paper with no general-interest hook.
- Identification that the profession no longer accepts (TWFE on staggered adoption, weak IV, cosmetic RDD).
- Contribution framed as "first to study X in context Y" without a methodological or conceptual advance.
- Significance treated as the finding; mechanism and external validity left thin.
Re-routing decision
- Narrower-but-excellent applied →
aej-applied-economics; macro →aej-macroeconomicsorreview-of-economic-dynamics; micro theory →aej-microeconomicsorjournal-of-economic-theory; policy →aej-economic-policyorjournal-of-public-economics. - Short, sharp, single-result papers →
aer-insights. - Field-leading specialist work → the relevant top field journal (
journal-of-labor-economics,journal-of-development-economics,journal-of-public-economics,journal-of-finance, etc.).
Output format
[Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason)
[Target] American Economic Review
[Topic tags] <2–3 closest topics>
[Method/evidence] <does the identification / theory clear AER's general-interest bar?>
[Top risk] <the single most likely reason for rejection>
[Official items to re-check] <submission system / fee / JEL / data-code policy / exhibits>
[Re-route suggestion] <if not a fit, a better-matched venue>
Version History
- 1839142 Current 2026-07-05 13:07
