propose-economics-paper-titles

Propose Economics Paper Titles

Design accurate, distinctive, concise English titles that compress what the paper is and make an honest promise to the right reader. Generate diversity by changing information architecture, not by swapping synonyms in one template.

Load the required knowledge

Before proposing, rewriting, or auditing titles, read all four references:

1. references/evidence-protocol.md — manuscript reading, evidence ledger, causal language, conflicts, and missing information.
2. references/title-knowledge.md — the complete guide-derived principles, rationales, title families, exceptions, and anti-patterns.
3. references/composition-and-length.md — candidate generation, ranking, promise audits, length, and paper-type adaptations.
4. references/quality-and-sources.md — final scoring, Top Five calibration, and provenance.

These references are mandatory. If the user supplies a journal style or title-length rule, follow it.

Non-negotiable rules

• Read enough of the paper body to determine the central object, relationship or task, evidence strength, contribution, and necessary scope.
• Treat every content word as a promise the body must deliver.
• Never add causal language, a mechanism, a general scope, a result direction, a novelty claim, or a design label without support.
• Treat gerunds and nominalized actions as factual claims. Reducing, Improving, Removing, and similar openings presuppose the intervention changed that object; supportive or consistent-with mechanism evidence does not license them.
• Apply a closed-world paraphrase rule: a smoother title expression is eligible only if the source entails it without adding scope, causal force, mechanism status, measurement meaning, evaluation, or centrality.
• Do not promote a secondary heterogeneity result, discussion point, or future-research idea into the title.
• Do not use first, new, novel, important, or similar self-evaluation unless the narrow claim is explicitly defensible; usually show contribution through specifics instead.
• Accuracy outranks cleverness and brevity. Brevity outranks detail only when no necessary distinction is lost.
• Formal title candidates are English by default. Explain tradeoffs in the user's language when helpful.
• If a title centers a behavior, mechanism, or decision observed only inside an estimated structural model, include model, structural, or an equally explicit model marker in that same title. Do not let readers infer that the behavior was directly observed.
• Preserve exact geographic scope. Evidence from 17 U.S. states does not license U.S. markets, the United States, or national scope unless the manuscript establishes national coverage.
• Preserve institutional hierarchy as well as geography. A study of municipal procurement does not license the umbrella public procurement; a paper on one occupation does not license a labor-market title. Use the narrowest source-defined institution unless broader coverage is established.
• Treat relationship operators as claims. versus, tradeoff, tension, offsetting, and contrast punctuation require explicit opposing directions or a source-stated conflict; two mechanisms or margins are not opponents merely because both appear in the model.
• Build an authorized title vocabulary from the manuscript's exact central nouns and source-authorized equivalents before generation. Every substantive noun in every displayed title must come from that list. Do not replace provider quality or service quality with workforce quality, human capital, or another broader construct unless the body explicitly establishes equivalence.
• Do not modify the source manuscript unless explicitly asked.