--- name: aej-economic-policy description: Use when targeting American Economic Journal: Economic Policy or deciding whether a policy-relevant applied economics manuscript fits this venue. Encodes the journal's fit, framing, method-and-evidence bar, house style, official-submission re-check, and desk-reject heuristics. --- # American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (aej-economic-policy) ## Journal positioning AEJ: Economic Policy is the American Economic Association's field home for policy-relevant applied economics one tier below AER's general-interest bar. It publishes credible evaluations of public, health, education, environmental, and tax/transfer policy — work where the identification is sound and the magnitudes speak directly to a policy question. The contribution is the policy lesson backed by clean causal evidence; this is the home for excellent policy-evaluation papers that are narrower than an AER general-interest swing. This skill is a **fit / venue-selection / re-framing** tool. It does not replace the journal's current official submission guidelines. Before submitting, re-check the live author instructions on the AEA site and the editorial-manager submission system. ## When to trigger - The author names AEJ: Policy as the target, or is stepping down from an AER policy submission. - A paper credibly evaluates a policy — tax, transfer, regulation, public program, health, education, environment — with policy-relevant magnitudes. - A strong applied paper has a clear policy reading and needs a venue that prizes policy relevance plus identification. - The author needs AEJ: Policy's desk-reject risks and a credible AER / public-economics alternative list. ## Scope & topic fit - Public economics and the design/evaluation of taxes, transfers, social insurance, and public programs. - Health, education, and environmental/energy policy evaluation with credible identification. - Regulation, market design in the public interest, and the distributional and welfare consequences of policy. - Applied work where the policy question and its quantitative answer are the contribution, not a methodological novelty. ## Method & evidence bar - Identification plus policy relevance is the joint filter: the design (RCT, DiD, IV, RDD, bunching) must be credible and the estimated effects must map onto a real policy parameter. - Modern estimators and inference are baseline — proper DiD under staggered policy adoption, valid instruments, RDD diagnostics, correct standard errors. - Magnitudes must be interpreted in policy terms (cost-effectiveness, welfare, incidence, behavioral responses), not left as significant coefficients. - Data and code transparency is mandatory; the AEA data and code availability and verification policy applies, with deposit checked before acceptance. ## Structure & house style - The introduction states the policy question, the identification, the headline effect and its policy-relevant magnitude, and the lesson for policy design. - Lead with the design and the policy-relevant estimate; develop welfare/distributional implications and mechanisms as support, with secondary analyses in an online appendix. - AEJ uses an unstructured abstract and JEL codes; robustness and supplementary tables belong in the appendix. - Exhibits should report magnitudes in interpretable units and connect estimates to the policy counterfactual. ## Official-submission checklist - Before giving submission-ready advice, read `../../resources/source-basis.md` and `../../resources/official-source-map.md`; start from the official source anchors for this journal family, then cite the current journal-specific page you checked. - Search the live site for "AEJ: Economic Policy submission guidelines" and the AEA "Data and Code Availability Policy," and follow the current versions. - Re-check the submission fee, formatting, abstract/JEL, anonymization, and figure/table standards on the editorial-manager system. - Re-check the current data/code deposit and verification workflow (openICPSR / AEA Data Editor), and for experiments any pre-registration / pre-analysis-plan expectations — enforced before acceptance. - If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win. ## Pre-submission self-check - [ ] One sentence stating the policy question and why the answer matters for policy design. - [ ] The contribution is stated as identification + policy-relevant magnitude, not as statistical significance. - [ ] The introduction positions the paper against the recent policy-evaluation frontier on this question. - [ ] Identification threats are addressed by design; magnitudes are interpreted in welfare/incidence/cost terms. - [ ] Data and code are ready for the AEA availability + verification workflow. ## Common desk-reject triggers - A policy "evaluation" with weak or correlational identification. - Naive TWFE on staggered policy adoption, weak IV, or RDD without density/covariate diagnostics. - Significant effects with no policy-relevant magnitude, welfare reading, or design lesson. - A descriptive policy commentary with no credible causal evidence. ## Re-routing decision - General-interest policy importance → `american-economic-review`; one crisp policy result → `aer-insights`. - Core public-economics field-leading → `journal-of-public-economics`; European policy-debate framing → `economic-policy`. - Applied micro where design (not policy) is the headline → `aej-applied-economics`; careful measurement / shorter → `review-of-economics-and-statistics`. - Field-specific policy → the relevant top field journal (`journal-of-health-economics`, `journal-of-environmental-economics-and-management`, `journal-of-labor-economics`). ## Output format ```text [Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason) [Target] American Economic Journal: Economic Policy [Topic tags] <2–3 closest topics> [Method/evidence] [Top risk] [Official items to re-check] [Re-route suggestion] ```