aejpol-referee-strategy

aejpol-referee-strategy is a skill for Claude Code from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. It costs 79 tokens per session (1,159 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for reading an American Economic Journal: Economic Policy manuscript as a referee, the person who evaluates it for the journal. It identifies likely objections about the policy question, causal evidence, welfare, robustness, and reproducibility.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before submitting or revising a policy-evaluation paper to triage weaknesses and anticipate referee concerns. It does not write the response letter or repair the analysis itself.
Why use it?
Authors often discover major weaknesses only after submission. This guide helps find the objections that may block publication and decide which problems to fix or explain first.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the aej-economic-policy-skills plugin — 12 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it before submitting or revising a policy-evaluation paper to triage weaknesses and anticipate referee concerns. It does not write the response letter or repair the analysis itself.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-referee-strategy
About the project

Awesome Journal Skills is a collection of agent skill packs tailored to hundreds of academic journals across fields including economics, social science, medicine, science, and engineering. Researchers use the packs for tasks such as choosing topics, designing empirical strategies, preparing tables and figures, submitting papers, and responding to reviewers. The catalogue entries are the project's journal-specific skills and related plugins.

brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills · 1,142 stars · on GitHub · copaper.ai

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill aejpol-referee-strategy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install aej-economic-policy-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for aejpol-referee-strategy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-referee-strategy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-referee-strategy)
Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for aejpol-referee-strategy

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<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-referee-strategy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-referee-strategy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 79 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,159 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00079 $0.01159
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00580
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00232
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00116

Measured 7d ago against content hash e85504dca5b3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-22, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

aejpol-referee-strategy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

AEJ-Economic-Policy-Skills/skills/aejpol-referee-strategy/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Referee Strategy — Reading the Manuscript as an AEJ: Policy Referee (aejpol-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

  • Before submitting: you want to find the objections a referee will raise first
  • Deciding whether the paper is ready or needs another round of work
  • Calibrating expectations about the AEA single-blind process and timeline
  • Triaging which weaknesses to fix vs. disclose before submission

How AEJ: Policy referees read

AEJ: Policy reviews are single-blind through the AEA system (referees see the authors; authors do not see referees), refereed by economists who expect both credible causal evidence and a policy-relevant welfare reading. A referee typically tests four things in order; a paper dies at the first one it fails:

  1. Is it a policy paper of broad interest? (the aejpol-topic-selection test) — a clean estimate with no policy lever or welfare reading invites a "better suited to a field journal / AEJ: Applied" rejection.
  2. Is the causal claim credible? (the aejpol-identification test) — staggered TWFE, asserted parallel trends, a weak instrument, or an over-generalized RDD are the usual kill shots.
  3. Does the welfare/policy reading follow? (the aejpol-theory-model test) — a hand-waved "this is welfare-improving" or a sufficient-statistic formula whose assumptions are violated.
  4. Is it robust and reproducible? (the aejpol-robustness / aejpol-replication-package tests).

Pre-empting the predictable objections

Likely referee objection Pre-emption to build before submitting
"This isn't a policy paper / not broad-interest" Lead with the policy question + welfare stake; state the cost-benefit reading in the abstract
"Staggered TWFE is biased here" Heterogeneity-robust DID + Bacon decomposition + flat leads, in the main paper
"Parallel trends is assumed, not shown" Event-study leads + honest-DID bounds
"Exclusion restriction is not credible" Institutional + theoretical defense + falsification
"The welfare claim is hand-waved" Explicit sufficient-statistic / MVPF / cost-benefit derivation
"External validity is unclear" Heterogeneity by setting; explicit scope of the policy lesson
"Effect is significant but tiny / not policy-relevant" Benchmark the magnitude against budget / status quo
"Not reproducible / data unavailable" AEA-compliant package + restricted-data access path ready

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 72 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e85504dca5b3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

aejpol-referee-strategy is a skill published in the GitHub repository brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills (1,142 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 1,159 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-15.

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