--- name: aej-applied-economics description: Use when targeting American Economic Journal: Applied Economics or deciding whether an applied micro 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 Journal: Applied Economics (aej-applied-economics) ## Journal positioning AEJ: Applied Economics is the American Economic Association's home for empirical applied microeconomics one tier below AER's general-interest bar. It publishes credible, well-identified empirical work — labor, development, health, education, and adjacent applied fields — where the design is clean and the economic magnitudes are meaningful. The contribution can be field-specific rather than discipline-wide, but the identification and execution must be top-quality; this is where excellent applied micro that is "too narrow for AER" belongs. 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 and the editorial-manager submission system. ## When to trigger - The author names AEJ: Applied as the target, or is stepping down from an AER applied-micro submission. - A paper has a credible quasi-experimental or field-experimental design in labor, development, health, or education with meaningful magnitudes. - A strong applied paper is excellent but narrower than AER's general-interest bar and needs the right applied home. - The author needs AEJ: Applied's desk-reject risks and a credible AER / applied-field alternative list. ## Scope & topic fit - Applied microeconomics with credible causal identification — labor, development, health, education, environment, and household behavior. - Field experiments (RCTs) and natural/quasi-experiments exploiting policy changes, shocks, or discontinuities. - Empirical papers whose value is a clean design answering a well-posed applied question, with economically interpretable effects. - Reduced-form work; lighter on heavy structural modeling than AEJ: Micro or general-interest venues. ## Method & evidence bar - Identification is the central filter: the design (RCT, DiD, IV, RDD) must be credible and pre-empt the obvious threats by design, not by robustness tables alone. - Modern estimators and inference are baseline — proper DiD under staggered treatment, valid first stages, RDD density/covariate-smoothness checks, correct standard errors. - Effects must be economically meaningful, not merely significant; magnitudes, mechanisms, and external validity are evaluated. - Data and code transparency is mandatory; the AEA data and code availability and verification policy applies, with deposit checked before acceptance. ## Structure & house style - The introduction states the applied question, the identification strategy, the headline effect and its magnitude, and what we learn that we did not before. - Lead with the design and the clean estimate; develop mechanism and heterogeneity as support, with secondary analyses in an online appendix. - AEJ uses an unstructured abstract and JEL codes; robustness and supplementary tables belong in the appendix. - Exhibits should report magnitudes and let the central estimate be read from one table or figure. ## Official-submission checklist - Before giving submission-ready advice, read `../../resources/source-basis.md` and `../../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 "AEJ: Applied Economics submission guidelines" and the AEA "Data and Code Availability Policy," and follow the current versions. - Re-check the submission fee, formatting, abstract/JEL, anonymization, and figure/table standards on the editorial-manager system. - Re-check the current data/code deposit and verification workflow (openICPSR / AEA Data Editor), and for RCTs any pre-registration / trial-registry and pre-analysis-plan expectations — enforced before acceptance. - If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win. ## Pre-submission self-check - [ ] One sentence stating the applied question and why the identification is credible. - [ ] The contribution is stated as identification + meaningful magnitude, not as statistical significance. - [ ] The introduction positions the paper against the recent applied-micro frontier on this question. - [ ] Identification threats are addressed by design; estimators, inference, and (for RCTs) pre-registration are state-of-the-art. - [ ] Data and code are ready for the AEA availability + verification workflow. ## Common desk-reject triggers - A correlational or weakly-identified design dressed up as causal. - Naive TWFE on staggered adoption, weak IV, or RDD without density/covariate diagnostics. - A statistically significant but economically tiny or uninterpretable effect. - "First to study X in context Y" with no design advance, mechanism, or generalizable lesson. ## Re-routing decision - General-interest applied importance → `american-economic-review`; a single crisp result → `aer-insights`. - Policy-evaluation framing with policy-relevant magnitudes → `aej-economic-policy` or `journal-of-public-economics`. - Heavy structural / quantitative micro → `aej-microeconomics`; careful measurement / short empirical → `review-of-economics-and-statistics`. - Field-leading specialist work → the relevant top field journal (`journal-of-labor-economics`, `journal-of-health-economics`, `journal-of-development-economics`). ## Output format ```text [Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason) [Target] American Economic Journal: Applied Economics [Topic tags] <2–3 closest topics> [Method/evidence] [Top risk] [Official items to re-check] [Re-route suggestion] ```