Econ register (econ)

What this skill carries — grep references/ for any subject the names below miss: !d=${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}; command -v skill-toc >/dev/null 2>&1 && exec skill-toc "$d"; s=$HOME/.claude/skills/plugin-utils/bin/skill-toc; [ -x "$s" ] && exec "$s" "$d"; echo "(skill-toc unavailable: references and scripts are NOT listed here — install the plugin-utils plugin, or start a new session so its bin/ reaches PATH)"

The base is writing-general, and it is assumed loaded alongside this file. Everything below is what is additional for finance and accounting journal prose. Nothing from the base is restated here.

You are drafting and revising finance / accounting journal prose — the register of the Journal of Finance, JFE, RFS, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, JAE, CAR and RAST, and of the working papers and job-market papers aimed at them.

Everything here is measured, not asserted. The source is a control corpus of 11,198 pre-2017 articles / 8,733,332 sentences (/data/eh2889/aitic_corpus on rjds), contrasted against 5,560,816 sentences of T14 law review scholarship. Percentages are share of sentences containing the feature, finance corpus first. Rates written n/M are hits per million sentences.

Register: what actually distinguishes this corpus

feature	finance	law	do
we	7.75%	0.87%	The authorial we is standard — nine times the law rate. Use it.
we find / show / document	0.58%	0.02%	The idiomatic way to state a result, 29× the law rate. We find that…, We document…
regression / coefficient / standard error	2.25%	0.05%	45× the law rate. The vocabulary of the method is the substance.
parentheticals	4.73%	1.93%	Qualifications and magnitudes ride in parentheses rather than footnotes.
e.g. / i.e.	1.23%	0.58%	Twice the law rate.
suggests that	0.70%	0.20%	Standard hedge for an inference from evidence.
Section 2	0.27%	0.09%	Cross-reference by Section, numerically. Never "Part II".
This paper	0.28%	0.02%	The self-reference. Lowercase p.
This Article	0.00%	0.06%	Wrong register. Do not write it.
supra / infra / id.	0.00%	1.91%	Absent. Never use Bluebook short forms here.
quotation marks	1.68%	8.36%	Quote sparingly — a fifth of the law rate. Paraphrase and cite.
semicolons	2.27%	4.33%	Half the law rate. Prefer two sentences.
may / might	1.99%	3.56%	Hedge less than law prose does. State the estimate and its standard error.

Conventions

• Lead with the finding, not the literature. McCloskey's rule: no "this paper discusses" boilerplate, no table-of-contents paragraph. Say what you found.
• Inline citations (Fama and French (1993)), not footnotes. Footnotes carry robustness qualifications and data caveats.
• Cross-reference by Section, numerically (Section 3.2).
• Report magnitudes with their uncertainty. A coefficient without a standard error is not a result. Give the economic magnitude, not just the significance.
• Name the identification assumption. Describing an empirical strategy without stating what makes it identify anything is the canonical fatal omission; referees reject papers for it.
• Tables are self-explanatory. Words in headings, not acronyms — Logarithm of Domestic Price, not LPDOM.

McCloskey, run through the finance corpus

The source guide is McCloskey's Economical Writing, vendored in full at ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/writing/references/economical-writing-full.md — read it there for the full text of any rule below. Where this file and that guide disagree, this file controls. McCloskey's prescriptions were checked against the same corpora and sorted three ways.

Ship

rule	why it holds
No boilerplate opener — This paper discusses…, As we shall see, The rest of this paper is organized as follows	It signals you have not found the hook. Open with the finding.
No table-of-contents paragraph	Readers skip it, and it cannot be understood before the paper is read.
One concept, one word — no elegant variation	industrialization / structural differentiation / development / growth for one thing makes the reader think there are four. Look back and reuse the word.
No ersatz economics — skyrocketing (2.9/M), fair prices, vicious cycle, exploit as a verb of blame	Rhetoric standing in for a magnitude. Give the number.
Repeat key words to link sentences	English coheres by repetition — (AB)(BC)(CD). Not only… but also is not cohesion.
End the paragraph a notch lower	A technical paragraph closing on a plain-English encapsulation is what makes it land.
Avoid invective	This is pure nonsense arouses the suspicion that the argument is weak.

Advisory

rule	measured reality	what to actually do
Delete every very	very <adj> at 3,277/M	Delete the ones doing no work. A blanket rule fires constantly and is not a tell.
Untie Teutonisms / noun pile-ups	the X process shape at 4,482/M	Untie the ones that hide an actor. factor price equalization is a term of art; leave it.
Replace this / these / those with the	pervasive in both corpora	Only where the referent is genuinely ambiguous.
Never repeat without apologizing	—	Fine as a check on structure, useless as a prose rule.
Drop the metric conversions	—	Convert once, then trust the reader. Not worth a finding.

Dropped

rule	why it is dropped
agents → people	1,728/M in the finance corpus. agents names the modelled decision-maker; people is a different claim. This rule rewrites the model, not the prose.
hypothesize → suppose	683/M in the finance corpus. It names a specific move in an empirical paper and has no plain-English synonym that keeps the meaning.
Avoid the authorial we (inherited from the general layer)	we runs 7.75% here, 8.9× the law rate. It is the register.
Prefer active voice on principle	passive 8.55% finance vs 7.91% law — not a register marker.

Vindicated in this corpus specifically

Beyond the shared list in writing-general: we acknowledge that runs 72.3/M here — sixteen times the law rate — and is idiomatic in this register precisely where a reviewer would call it hedging. Of course, runs 299.9/M. To be sure, is rarer here (11.5/M) than in law but is still attested and still not an AI tell.