Individual skill
jue-identification
Use when the spatial identification argument is the bottleneck for a Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) manuscript — boundary discontinuity, shift-share/Bartik, historical or geographic IV, place-based DiD, or mobility experiment. Stress-tests the spatial design against sorting, spillovers, and spatial-autocorrelation confounds before exhibits are finalized.
Journal-of-Urban-Economics-Skills/skills/jue-identification/SKILL.md
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# Spatial Identification (jue-identification)
## When to trigger
- A causal claim rests on OLS + region controls, or TWFE on staggered place-based policy
- A shift-share/Bartik instrument's exogeneity (shares vs shocks) is asserted, not argued
- A boundary/border discontinuity lacks a continuity-of-confounders defense
- The estimate could be driven by **spatial sorting/selection** across locations rather than the treatment
- Control areas may be contaminated by **spillovers/displacement** (SUTVA failure)
- Inference ignores **spatial autocorrelation** (Conley/HAC) and overstates precision
## The JUE identification bar
JUE referees are sophisticated about the failure modes that are *specific to space*. A clean national design is not enough; you must defend it against the three spatial confounds that recur in every urban paper: **(1) sorting/selection** — people, firms, and developers choose locations, so cross-location comparisons mix treatment with composition; **(2) spillovers/SUTVA** — treating one place moves activity to or from neighbors, contaminating controls and biasing reduced forms; **(3) spatial autocorrelation** — nearby units are correlated, so naive SEs are too small. State the estimand, name the identifying variation, show the diagnostic that could have failed, and address all three confounds explicitly.