Individual skill
qje-identification
Use when the causal identification strategy is the bottleneck for a Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) manuscript — RCT, staggered DID, IV, RDD, event study. Stress-tests the design to the QJE general-interest bar before tables are drafted.
Quarterly-Journal-of-Economics-Skills/skills/qje-identification/SKILL.md
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# Causal Identification (qje-identification)
## When to trigger
- The empirical core is OLS + controls with an undefended causal claim
- A DID uses two-way fixed effects (TWFE) on staggered timing without modern estimators
- An IV's first stage is weak or the exclusion restriction is unargued
- An RDD lacks a McCrary density test or bandwidth-robustness
- You are unsure your design clears the QJE causal bar
## The QJE identification bar
QJE rewards **credible identification serving a big question**, not technique for its own sake. Editorial reality shapes the bar: five Harvard-based Editors (Barro, Katz, Nunn, Shleifer, Stantcheva as of 2024) desk-screen in roughly two weeks, so the identifying variation must be legible and convincing on a first read. QJE's own canon mixes clean experiments and quasi-experiments with reduced-form ambition — e.g., Chetty, Hendren, Kline & Saez, "Where is the Land of Opportunity?" (QJE 2014), and Chetty et al. on Project STAR kindergarten effects (QJE 2011). The credibility ranking editors and referees implicitly apply (strong → weaker):
