write-economics-abstract

Write an Economics Abstract

Produce a self-contained English abstract that lets a reader recover four things accurately: the research task, how the paper answers it, what it finds, and what the findings mean. Treat factual fidelity as a hard constraint and prose quality as an optimization within that constraint.

Load the required knowledge

Before drafting, rewriting, or auditing, read all four references below. They are mandatory, not optional background:

1. references/evidence-protocol.md — manuscript reading, evidence ledger, causal language, conflicts, and missing information.
2. references/abstract-knowledge.md — the full guide-derived principles, rationales, exceptions, and anti-patterns.
3. references/composition-and-length.md — natural information order, paper-type adaptations, transitions, and elastic length.
4. references/quality-and-sources.md — final audit, scoring rules, Top Five calibration, and provenance.

Read the user's target-journal instructions first if supplied; a journal's hard limit overrides observed ranges.

Non-negotiable rules

• Ground every substantive statement in the supplied paper body or in a fact the user explicitly confirms.
• Never invent a contribution, result, coefficient, unit, sample, mechanism, robustness result, welfare claim, or policy implication.
• Do not upgrade association to causation, suggestive evidence to an established mechanism, or an author interpretation to a demonstrated fact.
• Verify each number with its direction, unit, baseline, estimand, population, and time horizon.
• For experiments and quasi-experiments, lock distinct design roles: assignment/randomization unit, treatment recipient, delivery actor, observation unit, and analysis unit. Never say the randomized unit received a treatment delivered to people or firms within it; express assignment and receipt in separate clauses when roles differ.
• Preserve the exact measured outcome and proxy status. Do not replace a price, index, proxy, score, ratio, or accounting measure with a broader construct such as cost, welfare, quality, productivity, or efficiency unless the manuscript establishes equivalence.
• Apply a closed-world paraphrase rule: a smoother expression is eligible only if the source entails it without adding scope, causal force, mechanism status, measurement meaning, evaluation, or centrality.
• Copy constructed sample and eligibility definitions into a locked phrase bank before drafting. Preserve their defining condition, place, lookback window, and event; do not replace them with category labels such as new, incumbent, local, eligible, or inactive unless the manuscript itself proves that equivalence.
• Lock the complete outcome tuple as well: outcome/proxy + population/subgroup + unit + comparison + horizon. Every repetition—including the closing synthesis—must preserve all scope-bearing members. Mean exam scores among new providers may not become mean exam scores or a general claim about service quality.
• For structural selection, preparation, equilibrium, or decomposition results, preserve each component's reported direction and relation. Do not assert that one channel dominates, offsets, outweighs, or is stronger than another unless the manuscript explicitly reports that comparison. An ambiguous net sign remains ambiguous even if a particular estimated counterfactual has a sign.
• Treat modest, large, small, meaningful, important, broad, and similar evaluations as claims. Omit them unless the manuscript provides or explicitly states the comparison basis.
• For consistent-with, supportive, or suggestive mechanisms, use only a noncausal evidence form (patterns are consistent with X, evidence is suggestive of X, or the manuscript's weaker wording). Do not combine a hedge with drove, explains, operates through, because, by reducing, or another causal predicate.
• Lock the identified treatment as the causal subject of every effect and implication sentence, including the final sentence. When alerts are randomized but information frictions are only a candidate mechanism, write timely alerts increased participation; never write reducing information frictions expanded/can expand participation or substitute the channel for the treatment.
• Treat “first,” “novel,” “new,” and “fills a gap” as factual claims requiring explicit, supportable scope.
• Use the old abstract and introduction as orientation and consistency checks, not as the final authority over results.
• Keep the formal abstract in English by default. Communicate necessary questions or risks in the user's language.
• Do not modify the user's manuscript unless the user explicitly asks for file edits.