aer-paper-body

AER Paper Body

Overview

The introduction decides whether the editor sends the paper out; the body sections decide what the referees write. Referees live in Data, Empirical Strategy, and Results, checking that the estimand is defined, the assumption stated, the magnitudes interpreted, and the prose matched to the tables. Draft the body before the introduction — the introduction summarizes a paper that already exists, and writing it first produces promises the body fails to keep.

When to Use

• The empirics are stable (after aer-identification and aer-robustness) and the manuscript needs full section drafts
• A results section reads like a table walk-through ("Column 1 shows...") and needs narration surgery
• A referee called the paper "hard to follow," "under-interpreted," or "reads like a report"
• Coefficients are reported but never converted into economic magnitudes
• The conclusion restates the abstract and needs to do real work

Canonical Section Architecture

A full-length empirical AER paper, after the unlabeled introduction:

I.   Background  (or: Institutional Setting; Policy Context)
II.  Data        (sources, sample construction, measurement, summary stats)
III. Empirical Strategy   (estimand, equation, identifying assumption, inference)
IV.  Results     (main estimates, dynamics, robustness pointers)
V.   Mechanisms  (or: Heterogeneity and Mechanisms; Interpretation)
VI.  Conclusion

Variants: a conceptual framework goes between Background and Data (or replaces Background for theory-led papers); AER: Insights compresses to Data and Design → Results → Discussion; structural papers add Model and Estimation, where the rules below bind with more force, not less. One rule binds everywhere: every term, dataset, and design feature is defined before first use — referees read linearly on the first pass.

Section I — Background / Institutional Setting

Give exactly the institutional detail needed to (a) locate the identifying variation and (b) believe the identifying assumption — nothing else.