---
name: jpe-topic-selection
description: Use when scoping or framing a research question for a Journal of Political Economy (JPE) manuscript and you need to test whether it is "JPE-shaped" — i.e., a mechanism-driven economic question, not an atheoretical correlation. Diagnoses fit and frames the contribution; it does not design the empirics.
---

# Topic Selection & Fit (jpe-topic-selection)

## When to trigger

- You have data or a result but not yet a sharp economic question
- You are unsure whether the paper belongs at JPE, a field journal, or a methods journal
- The pitch is "X is correlated with Y" with no mechanism or model behind it
- You are deciding between JPE proper and the **2023-launched companion journals** (JPE Microeconomics, lead editor John List; JPE Macroeconomics, lead editor Greg Kaplan)

## The JPE fit test

JPE (founded 1892, edited at the University of Chicago; lead editor Esteban Rossi-Hansberg) publishes the full breadth of economics, but with a premium on **rigorous economic reasoning** and a **price-theoretic / mechanism-driven** angle — the Chicago lineage of Becker's "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach" (JPE 1968) and Black and Scholes's "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities" (JPE 1973). Score the idea against these five questions before committing:

1. **Mechanism** — Can you state the economic mechanism in one sentence, and does the paper test *that mechanism* (not just a net effect)?
2. **Theory linkage** — Does economic theory make a prediction here that your evidence can confirm or refute? "Theory predicts ∂y/∂x > 0; we estimate it and find..."
3. **Generality** — Is the lesson portable beyond the specific setting, or is it a one-off policy evaluation? JPE wants the former.
4. **Incentives / equilibrium** — Have you considered how agents optimize and how the market clears? A Chicago referee will. Partial-equilibrium stories that ignore obvious GE feedback are vulnerable.
5. **Importance** — Would a non-specialist economist care about the answer? Top-five papers move a literature, not a niche.

If you score high on 3+ including (1) and (2), it is plausibly JPE-shaped. If the idea is essentially "we ran a clean DID on policy P," it is a field-journal paper until you supply the mechanism and the general lesson.

## JPE proper vs. the companion journals (a routing choice that does not exist at AER or QJE)

Since the **2023 launch** of the vertically integrated companions (first issues March 2023):

- **JPE proper**: broad importance; theory + empirics integrated; appeals across fields.
- **JPE Microeconomics** (lead editor John List, University of Chicago): micro theory, IO, contract/market design, applied micro with a tight mechanism.
- **JPE Macroeconomics** (lead editor Greg Kaplan, University of Chicago): macro, growth, monetary, fiscal, quantitative macro / structural.
- A narrow but deep contribution that a generalist would skip often fits a companion better — and a desk rejection at JPE proper sometimes routes there.

## Contribution framing (do this before writing the intro)

State the contribution as a numbered set of claims, each tied to economics — not to data novelty alone:

- **Claim 1 (the economics):** what economic force / margin the paper identifies and why it was not obvious.
- **Claim 2 (the evidence or theory):** how you establish it (model result, structural estimate, or credibly identified effect).
- **Claim 3 (the broader implication):** what the result implies for theory, welfare, or other settings.

"We are the first to use dataset D" is not a contribution. "We isolate the [substitution / selection / general-equilibrium] channel that prior work conflated" is.

## Checklist

- [ ] One-sentence mechanism written down and falsifiable
- [ ] An explicit theoretical prediction the paper tests
- [ ] The general economic lesson stated (portable beyond the setting)
- [ ] Equilibrium / incentive / selection considerations acknowledged
- [ ] JPE proper vs. field outlet decision made and justified
- [ ] Contribution drafted as economic claims, not data/method firsts
- [ ] Two or three living economists who would referee this can be named, and the paper answers a question they care about

## Anti-patterns

- An atheoretical correlation dressed up with controls — "kitchen-sink regression in search of a story"
- A clean policy evaluation with no model and no portable lesson (reads as a working paper)
- Claiming novelty from a dataset rather than from an economic insight
- Ignoring obvious general-equilibrium feedback (e.g., estimating a partial effect a referee will say nets out in equilibrium)
- Targeting JPE proper with a narrow field contribution that a generalist would not finish reading

## Output format

```
【Question】one-sentence economic question
【Mechanism】the economic channel being tested
【Theory prediction】sign/shape theory predicts + the test
【General lesson】what economics learns beyond this setting
【Outlet】JPE proper / JPE Microeconomics / JPE Macroeconomics (+ why)
【Contribution claims】1... 2... 3...
【Fit verdict】JPE-shaped / reframe / field journal
【Next】jpe-literature-positioning
```