AER-Skills

AER-Skills is a community skill stack by Bryce Wang for economists targeting the American Economic Review, AER: Insights and the AEJ journals. It's deliberately narrow: identification-first empirics, replication packages that follow the AEA's data and code policy, tight introductions and abstracts, AER-style tables, and efficient rebuttals, organized as a gated workflow from topic to revise-and-resubmit. What its skills teach your agent - aer-workflow: a routing map that says which skill to use next, with quality gates between steps - aer-topic-selection and aer-literature: test a topic against the top-5 bar, choose between AER, Insights and AEJ, and map the closest papers with every reference verified - aer-identification and aer-preregistration: modern designs (staggered DiD, weak-IV-robust IV, RDD, synthetic control, shift-share) and pre-analysis plans with power calculations - aer-robustness, aer-paper-body and aer-introduction: referee-anticipating robustness, the body sections, a five-paragraph introduction and a 100-word abstract - aer-tables-figures and aer-consistency: AER booktabs tables and a full-manuscript audit of numbers, tables and cross-references - aer-referee-sim: a desk screen plus three simulated referee reports, scored against an editorial rubric - aer-replication, aer-submission and aer-rebuttal: the AEA replication package and openICPSR deposit, a submission preflight, and the R&R response letter - aer-statspai: runs the estimation with the maker's StatsPAI Python engine How to install it - In Claude Code, add the maker's marketplace and install the aer-skills plugin; all fifteen skills load. - Or clone the AER-Skills repo and run python3 scripts/install_skills.py claude (or codex). - It's also part of the maker's Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills collection. Good to know - Skills bundle Stata, R and Python templates; the repo pins its numeric demos to known values and checks every citation against Crossref. - It's a community project, MIT-licensed, and not affiliated with the American Economic Association.

• “Does this topic clear the bar for the AER, or is it an AEJ paper?”

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• “Check my staggered difference-in-differences design and suggest a robust estimator.”

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• “Draft a five-paragraph introduction and a 100-word abstract for this paper.”

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• “Format these regression results as AER-style booktabs tables.”

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• “Run a referee simulation on my draft before I submit.”

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• “Build the replication package for the AEA's data and code policy.”

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