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Twelve agent skills for short-format manuscripts targeted at American Economic Review: Insights (AER: Insights) — the American Economic Association's journal (founded 2019) for short, self-contained papers built around ONE important, well-executed idea (empirical, theoretical, or methodological). The bar is AER-level importance compressed into a short paper. The whole pack is engineered around two hard constraints: the length cap (≤7,000 words with no exhibits, minus 200 per exhibit, maximum five exhibits, abstract ≤100 words) and the single-insight discipline — everything secondary goes to the online Supplemental Appendix. It also encodes the journal's fast, decisive review (no traditional revise-and-resubmit; first decisions are conditional accept or reject), the AEA submission portal, fees, metadata/classifications, and the AEA Data and Code Availability Policy.
Official basis checked 2026-06-20: AEA / AER: Insights submission, editorial-policy, editors,
style-guide, accepted-article, JEL, and AEA Data and Code Availability pages. Sources and live-check
items are in resources/official-source-map.md.
| AER: Insights constraint | What it forces on the manuscript |
|---|---|
| Hard length cap (≤7,000 words − 200/exhibit; ≤5 exhibits; abstract ≤100 words) | Over the cap → returned unreviewed; cut to fit from day one |
| One idea per paper | A single headline result carries everything; secondary results go to the appendix |
| Lead-with-the-result writing | The answer (with SE/CI) appears in the first paragraph, not Section 4 |
| No traditional R&R | First decision is conditional accept or reject — pre-empt objections before submitting |
| Conditional accept (~8 weeks, usually no second referee round) | The revision is finishing, not relitigating |
| AEA house presentation | Single-blind review; title/byline/affiliations on the first page; no significance asterisks |
| AEA Data & Code Availability Policy | openICPSR deposit verified by the AEA Data Editor before publication (appendix in scope) |
As a Claude Code plugin — point your marketplace at this directory and enable the plugin:
/plugin marketplace add ./AER-Insights-Skills
/plugin install aer-insights-skills
Manually — each skill is a self-contained SKILL.md under skills/. Open skills/aeri-workflow/SKILL.md
first; it routes you to the right skill for your current stage.
aeri-topic-selection → aeri-literature-positioning → aeri-identification → aeri-theory-model
→ aeri-robustness → aeri-tables-figures → aeri-writing-style → aeri-replication-package
→ aeri-referee-strategy → aeri-submission → aeri-rebuttal
(aeri-workflow routes among all of the above)
| # | Skill | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | aeri-workflow |
Router — diagnose the current bottleneck and route to the right skill |
| 2 | aeri-topic-selection |
Confirm ONE crisp, important, well-identified insight that stands alone (vs AER / AEJ) |
| 3 | aeri-literature-positioning |
Stake the contribution in one or two paragraphs — no survey |
| 4 | aeri-identification |
Make the design or parameter identification clean enough to defend short |
| 5 | aeri-theory-model |
Keep only the minimal model the single insight requires |
| 6 | aeri-robustness |
Triage checks: ≤2 in-text, the rest to the Supplemental Appendix |
| 7 | aeri-tables-figures |
Fit the five-exhibit budget, one page each, no significance asterisks |
| 8 | aeri-writing-style |
Lead with the result; enforce the word cap and the ≤100-word abstract |
| 9 | aeri-replication-package |
Build the openICPSR deposit for the AEA Data Editor check |
| 10 | aeri-referee-strategy |
Understand the fast, decisive review; pre-empt the objections short papers cannot survive |
| 11 | aeri-submission |
Final preflight: word/exhibit gates, abstract, author metadata, fee, declarations, data policy |
| 12 | aeri-rebuttal |
Draft the concise conditional-accept response and revision plan |
resources/README.md— capability-layer indexresources/official-source-map.md— official AEA / AER: Insights URLs behind every factresources/external_tools.md— data sources, software, packages for short empirical/structural/methods workresources/worked-examples/01-introduction.md— a before→after AER: Insights introduction that leads with the single result (fictional)resources/exemplars/library.md— real, web-verified AER: Insights papers by method × topicresources/code/— reproducible Stata + Python causal-inference skeleton (vendored)
| Journal | Niche | This pack's positioning |
|---|---|---|
| AER: Insights | One important idea, short, fast review | The target of this pack |
| American Economic Review (AER) | General-interest, multi-result, longer flagship | AER: Insights takes single-idea papers that do not need AER's length |
| AEJ family (Applied / Micro / Macro / Policy) | Field-oriented full papers | AER: Insights is general-interest and short, not field-internal |
| QJE / JPE / Econometrica | Long, agenda-setting field/general papers | AER: Insights is deliberately a short outlet for a single clean insight |
- AER: Insights: https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/aeri
- AER: Insights submission guidelines: https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/aeri/submissions
- AEA Data and Code Availability Policy: https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/policies/data-code
MIT © 2026 Bryce Wang. See LICENSE.