aejpol-theory-model

aejpol-theory-model is a skill for Claude Code from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. It costs 77 tokens per session (1,089 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for building a small economic framework that connects a causal estimate to welfare, cost-benefit, or distributional conclusions. A causal estimate is a measured change intended to show what caused an outcome; welfare concerns how a policy affects people's well-being.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to map estimates into sufficient statistics, marginal value of public funds, cost-benefit results, or optimal-policy conclusions while stating the needed assumptions.
Why use it?
It fills the gap between showing that a policy changes an outcome and explaining what that change means for policy decisions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

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

Good fit Use it to map estimates into sufficient statistics, marginal value of public funds, cost-benefit results, or optimal-policy conclusions while stating the needed assumptions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-theory-model
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-theory-model
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-theory-model

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-theory-model/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-theory-model)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-theory-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-theory-model/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

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-theory-model

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-theory-model"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-theory-model.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,089 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 $0.00077 $0.01089
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00544
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00109

Measured 7d ago against content hash e9633df8ba07, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-22, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

aejpol-theory-model 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-theory-model/SKILL.md · 71 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 71 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Theory / Welfare Model — Estimate-to-Policy Bridge (aejpol-theory-model)

When to trigger

  • You have a credible causal estimate but no framework to say what it means for welfare or policy
  • A referee says the welfare claim is "hand-waved" or the "so what" is missing
  • You need to convert an elasticity / treatment effect into a cost-benefit or optimal-policy statement
  • A reviewer asks "what is the sufficient statistic, and does your estimate identify it?"

The AEJ: Policy role of theory

At AEJ: Policy theory is usually in service of the policy reading, not the headline. Most papers do not need a full structural model; they need a transparent framework that turns a reduced-form estimate into a welfare, cost-benefit, or distributional object a policymaker can use. Pick the lightest framework that delivers the policy statement and make its assumptions explicit.

Bridge paths (lightest first)

Path A: Sufficient statistics / MVPF
  • Write the welfare expression and show which estimated objects are the sufficient statistics (e.g., an elasticity, a fiscal externality, a pass-through). State that your design identifies exactly those.
  • For spending/tax policies, a Marginal Value of Public Funds (benefit to recipients per dollar of net government cost) is the canonical AEJ: Policy summary — define the numerator and denominator and which estimates feed each.
  • State the assumptions the sufficient-statistic formula buys you (envelope conditions, no income effects, partial-equilibrium scope) and where they could fail.
Path B: Cost-benefit / fiscal accounting
  • Build the explicit ledger: program cost, behavioral-response fiscal effects, benefits to recipients, externalities. Show the net cost per unit of outcome (cost per job, per ton abated, per QALY-equivalent, per child lifted) with uncertainty propagated from the estimate's SE.
  • Distinguish mechanical from behavioral effects; the behavioral term is what your causal estimate supplies.

Read the full file on GitHub · 71 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 · 71 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A e9633df8ba07

Subscribe to this mod's changes

aejpol-theory-model is a skill published in the GitHub repository brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills (1,142 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 1,089 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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