brycewang-stanford Referee Strategy (aeja-referee-strategy)
When to trigger
- The paper is near submission and you want to stress-test it against the referees it will draw
- You need to decide which robustness 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 AEJ: Applied's single-blind peer-review process shapes strategy
How AEJ: Applied review works (plan around it)
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.
The objection map (pre-empt in the paper)
| 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) |
Strategy craft
- 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, that is a hole to fix before submission.
- Pre-empt, do not hide. Address the obvious weakness head-on in the text; referees punish papers that ignore the elephant.
- Sequence robustness. Put decisive checks in the main paper; hold secondary ones for the appendix/online appendix so the paper stays readable.
- Anticipate the external-validity ask. It is almost guaranteed for a local design — have the estimand and scope statement ready.
- Make reproducibility visible. A referee who sees a clean package is less inclined to suspect specification search.
The shared, venue-neutral objection catalog is in
../../resources/README.md(links to the empirical-methods hub) — walk it before drafting.
Checklist
- Title/byline/front matter align with AEJ: Applied's single-blind process
- Each identifying assumption has a written hostile-referee sentence and a one-paragraph+one-exhibit answer
- The paper's biggest weakness is addressed in the text, not hidden
- Decisive robustness in the main paper; secondary checks in the appendix
- Estimand + external-validity scope stated to pre-empt the guaranteed ask
- Reproducibility package referenced so specification-search suspicion is defused
- Mechanism evidence distinguishes the proposed channel from rivals
Anti-patterns
- Ignoring the obvious design weakness and hoping no referee notices
- Writing self-citations or acknowledgments as if the venue required anonymous review
- Dumping every robustness check into the main text so the paper becomes unreadable
- No estimand statement, guaranteeing an external-validity round-trip
- Treating the replication package as someone else's problem until acceptance
Output format
【Front matter】single-blind title/byline and disclosures ready? [Y/N]
【Objection map】per assumption: [objection → pre-emption in paper]
【Biggest weakness】addressed in text? [Y/N] — how: ___
【Robustness placement】main vs appendix split: ___
【External validity】estimand + scope stated? [Y/N]
【Reproducibility visible】package referenced? [Y/N]
【Next step】aeja-submission
Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → AEJ-Applied-Economics-Skills/skills/aeja-referee-strategy/SKILL.md