Referee Strategy (aeja-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

• The paper is near submission and you want to stress-test it against the referees it will draw
• You need to decide which robustness checks to run before submitting vs. hold in reserve
• An R&R arrived and you must map referee concerns to concrete responses
• You want to understand how AEJ: Applied's single-blind peer-review process shapes strategy

How AEJ: Applied review works (plan around it)

AEJ: Applied uses single-blind review through the AEA ScholarOne system: author identities are visible to referees, while referee identities remain anonymous to authors. An editor assigns the paper to a coeditor or handles it directly, and before a first R&R the handling coeditor consults a second coeditor. Referees here are identification-literate applied microeconomists; the modal report attacks the credibility of the design first, then magnitude/mechanism, then external validity. The editor weighs whether the contribution is novel and the design clears the bar. Plan to pre-empt the predictable objections in the paper itself, leaving the response letter for genuinely new asks.

The objection map (pre-empt in the paper)

Referee objection (by design)	Pre-emption to build in now
"TWFE is biased under staggered timing"	heterogeneity-robust estimator + Bacon decomposition already in the paper
"Parallel trends is not credible"	clean pre-trend leads + honest-DID sensitivity bound
"Instrument is not excludable"	institutional + theoretical exclusion argument + falsification tests
"RD jump is manipulation / bandwidth-driven"	density test + bandwidth sensitivity + donut
"Effect is just selection / confounding"	Oster δ / coefficient-stability bounds
"Local/ITT effect ≠ the policy-relevant effect"	explicit estimand + calibrated external-validity discussion
"Inference too narrow (few clusters)"	wild-cluster bootstrap / randomization inference
"Mechanism is a black box"	a test that distinguishes the proposed channel from rivals
"Not reproducible"	the openICPSR package built and referenced (aeja-replication-package)

Strategy craft

1. War-game the design. For each identifying assumption, write the sentence a hostile referee would use; if you cannot answer it in one paragraph + one exhibit, that is a hole to fix before submission.
2. Pre-empt, do not hide. Address the obvious weakness head-on in the text; referees punish papers that ignore the elephant.
3. Sequence robustness. Put decisive checks in the main paper; hold secondary ones for the appendix/online appendix so the paper stays readable.
4. Anticipate the external-validity ask. It is almost guaranteed for a local design — have the estimand and scope statement ready.
5. Make reproducibility visible. A referee who sees a clean package is less inclined to suspect specification search.

The shared, venue-neutral objection catalog is in ../../resources/README.md (links to the empirical-methods hub) — walk it before drafting.

Checklist

• Title/byline/front matter align with AEJ: Applied's single-blind process
• Each identifying assumption has a written hostile-referee sentence and a one-paragraph+one-exhibit answer
• The paper's biggest weakness is addressed in the text, not hidden
• Decisive robustness in the main paper; secondary checks in the appendix
• Estimand + external-validity scope stated to pre-empt the guaranteed ask
• Reproducibility package referenced so specification-search suspicion is defused
• Mechanism evidence distinguishes the proposed channel from rivals

Anti-patterns

• Ignoring the obvious design weakness and hoping no referee notices
• Writing self-citations or acknowledgments as if the venue required anonymous review
• Dumping every robustness check into the main text so the paper becomes unreadable
• No estimand statement, guaranteeing an external-validity round-trip
• Treating the replication package as someone else's problem until acceptance

Output format

【Front matter】single-blind title/byline and disclosures ready? [Y/N]
【Objection map】per assumption: [objection → pre-emption in paper]
【Biggest weakness】addressed in text? [Y/N] — how: ___
【Robustness placement】main vs appendix split: ___
【External validity】estimand + scope stated? [Y/N]
【Reproducibility visible】package referenced? [Y/N]
【Next step】aeja-submission