Referee Strategy (imfer-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

• The paper is near submission and you want to stress-test it against the referees it will draw
• You must decide which robustness/identification checks to run before submitting vs. hold in reserve
• An R&R arrived and you must map referee concerns to concrete responses
• You want to understand how IMFER's double-blind, dual-audience review shapes strategy

How IMFER review works (plan around it)

IMFER uses double-blind review through Editorial Manager (anonymize the main file and self-citations) (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准). The distinctive feature is the referee pool: typically one frontier international-macro researcher and readers attuned to policy relevance and IMF-program realism. The modal report attacks (1) the credibility of the cross-country / policy-surprise design, then (2) country composition and external validity, then (3) whether the policy implication is actually warranted. A clean estimate with an over-reached or under-developed policy claim is a common rejection. Plan to pre-empt the predictable objections in the paper and reserve the letter for genuinely new asks.

Triaging which checks to run before vs. after

Not every conceivable check belongs in the submitted paper. Run before submission the checks a referee is near-certain to demand — the country-composition tests, the global-cycle control, the modern staggered-DID estimator, the cross-country-robust inference — because their absence reads as a hole. Hold in reserve the secondary perturbations (alternative deflators, additional subsamples, a placebo or two) that you can deploy in the response letter if asked, so the submitted paper stays readable. The judgment call is the boundary: anything an IMFER referee would consider a threat to the headline goes in now; anything that is merely a "would be nice" can wait. Putting reserve checks in an online appendix you reference is the safe middle path.

Strategy craft

1. War-game the design. For each identifying assumption, write the sentence a hostile referee would use; if you cannot answer it in one paragraph + one exhibit, fix it before submission.
2. War-game the policy claim. IMFER's distinctive risk is the policy referee: state exactly what the finding licenses and what it does not.
3. Lead with composition. Put leave-one-country-out and the global-cycle control in the main paper — these are the first things an IMFER referee checks.
4. Pre-empt, do not hide the obvious weakness; referees punish papers that ignore the elephant.
5. Make reproducibility visible so the restricted-data concern is defused before it is raised.

Checklist

• Main file and self-citations anonymized for double-blind review
• Each identifying assumption has a hostile-referee sentence and a one-paragraph+one-exhibit answer
• Country-composition checks (leave-one-out, drop-dominant) in the main paper
• Global financial cycle / common-shock confound pre-empted
• Policy-endogeneity and selection-into-program addressed
• Decisive checks placed in the main paper; reserve checks held for the letter or online appendix
• Estimand + policy magnitude + scope of the implication stated to pre-empt the policy referee
• The policy claim is bounded to what the evidence supports (no overreach)
• External validity / transfer regime named to pre-empt the guaranteed scope question
• Reproducibility package referenced so restricted-data suspicion is defused

Anti-patterns

• Ignoring the obvious design weakness and hoping no referee notices
• Leaving identifiers/self-citations that break double-blind anonymity
• Over-reaching the policy implication — the fastest way to lose the policy referee
• No country-composition checks when one economy obviously dominates
• Treating the global financial cycle as someone else's problem
• Leaving the replication package as an acceptance-time afterthought
• Writing for the academic referee only and forgetting the paper will also be read for program realism
• Dumping every reserve check into the main text so the paper becomes unreadable
• Assuming an international-macro referee will not notice mis-specified cross-country inference

Worked vignette (illustrative)

Before submitting a debt-spillover paper, the team war-games both tracks. The academic sentence: "Your event windows overlap the GFC, so you are picking up the global shock." Pre-emption: drop the GFC window and add a global-cycle control in the main paper. The policy sentence: "You claim restructurings should be faster, but your sample is all post-default — survivorship." Pre-emption: re-scope the implication to defaulting countries and add a selection-into-default note. Each objection gets one paragraph plus one exhibit in the paper, so the actual reports raise only genuinely new points.

Referee pushback mapped to the pre-emption

• "This is the global financial cycle, not your variable." → Show the global-cycle control and the dropped-crisis window in the main text before a referee asks.
• "The policy claim overreaches." → State the estimand and bound the implication to the regime the design covers.
• "Restricted data — can this be reproduced?" → Reference the built package with access instructions so the suspicion never forms.

Output format

【Journal】IMF Economic Review
【Skill】imfer-referee-strategy
【Anonymization】main file + self-cites blinded? [Y/N]
【Design objection map】per assumption: [objection → pre-emption in paper]
【Composition checks】leave-one-out / drop-dominant in main paper? [Y/N]
【Common-shock】global-cycle control shown? [Y/N]
【Policy claim】estimand + magnitude stated; implication bounded? [Y/N]
【Reproducibility visible】package referenced? [Y/N]
【Next step】imfer-submission