aejpol-topic-selection

aejpol-topic-selection is a skill for Claude Code from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. It costs 0 tokens per session (1,357 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A topic-selection guide for American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, a research journal focused on the effects and design of public policy. It helps assess whether a project has a clear policy question and a meaningful effect on welfare, costs, or groups of people.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to sharpen the policy question, identify the policy lever being studied, compare the project with possible journals, and clarify its contribution.
Why use it?
It addresses the problem of having an interesting result without a clear reason why policymakers or a broad economics audience should care.

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 to sharpen the policy question, identify the policy lever being studied, compare the project with possible journals, and clarify its contribution.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-topic-selection
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 · 1,372 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-topic-selection
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-topic-selection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-topic-selection/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-topic-selection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-topic-selection/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-topic-selection

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aejpol-topic-selection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,357 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 $0.00000 $0.01357
Opus 5.5 $0.00000 $0.00543
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00000 $0.00271
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00136

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 2677207254f6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

aejpol-topic-selection 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 1mo 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-topic-selection/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Topic Selection & Policy-Question Fit (aejpol-topic-selection)

When to trigger

  • You have a clean empirical result but are unsure it is "an AEJ: Policy paper"
  • The project could plausibly go to J. Public Economics, AEJ: Applied, or AER and you must pick
  • A referee or colleague says the question is "narrow," "not a policy paper," or "so what?"
  • You can state a finding but not yet a policy question with a welfare / cost-benefit / distributional stake

The AEJ: Policy bar — lead with the policy question

AEJ: Policy publishes the economic analysis OF policy: a paper is built around a policy question ("should this tax / mandate / subsidy / regulation exist, expand, or change, and at what welfare cost?") whose answer carries a welfare, cost-benefit, or distributional implication of broad interest to the AEA readership. Two halves must both be present from the first page:

  1. A real policy lever. A specific instrument someone could pull — a credit, a tax schedule, an eligibility rule, an emissions standard, a transfer, a mandate, an enforcement regime. Not just "an interesting natural experiment."
  2. A counterfactual / welfare reading. What changes, for whom, and is it worth it — a cost-benefit ratio, a marginal-value-of-public-funds (MVPF), an incidence/distributional split, or a calibrated welfare number. A clean estimate with no policy reading is off-fit.

Policy areas in scope

Public economics & taxation · environmental & energy · health · education · labor & social insurance · regulation & antitrust · development policy · political economy of policy. Empirical (quasi-experimental / RCT) and applied-theory work both fit — provided the policy question and welfare relevance are explicit.

Fit decision table (route by the dominant pull)

If the paper is mainly… It belongs at… Tell
broad-interest policy question + credible causal evidence + welfare reading AEJ: Policy the policy lesson is the headline
a deep field-public-finance contribution for specialists J. Public Economics broad readership would not follow the "so what"
identification-driven applied micro with no policy lever / welfare claim AEJ: Applied the natural experiment, not a policy, is the point
a first-order, general-interest result warranting top-5 length AER the contribution is larger and longer than a field-leading policy paper

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 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. 1mo ago First seen · 78 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 2677207254f6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

aejpol-topic-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills (1,372 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,357 tokens. 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.

Related

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aejpol-topic-selection next to 6 skills from other repositories
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