ecj-robustness

• SKILL.mdcore · 5,996 bytes
• SKILL.mdcore · 5,996 bytes

# Robustness & Alternative Explanations (ecj-robustness)

## When to trigger

- The headline result is one regression with one set of choices
- You have not ruled out the obvious competing economic explanations
- A structural result has not been shown to survive perturbing key assumptions
- You suspect a referee will say "this is fragile" or "this is mechanism A, not your mechanism B"

## The EJ logic of robustness

At EJ, robustness is not a ritual table of "still significant." It is an argument that **the economic interpretation survives**, and that rival mechanisms are ruled out — and because the interpretation is what makes the result broadly interesting, fragility there is fatal. A demanding general-interest referee thinks adversarially: which alternative economic story produces the same coefficient, and how do you exclude it? Over-reliance on a single specification is an explicit anti-pattern. And because acceptance triggers the **EJ Data Editor** rerunning your code against the **Zenodo** deposit (RES policy, DCAS-endorsed; see `ecj-replication-package`), every robustness number must come from code that actually executes and reproduces — fragility you papered over will surface in verification. Distinguish three jobs:

1. **Specification robustness** — the number is not an artifact of arbitrary choices.