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qje-literature-positioning

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Use when staking a Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) manuscript's contribution against the frontier — what it builds on, what it overturns, and why it belongs in a general-interest journal. Positions the contribution; it does not write the full literature survey.

Quarterly-Journal-of-Economics-Skills/skills/qje-literature-positioning/SKILL.md

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# Literature Positioning (qje-literature-positioning)

## When to trigger

- The contribution-relative-to-literature is fuzzy or buried
- The intro lists references but never says what is *new*
- A coauthor or reader asks "how is this different from [recent paper]?"
- You are unsure which literatures the paper should speak to

## QJE positioning principle: contribution, not catalog

QJE intros do **not** open with a freestanding "literature review" section. The contribution is woven into the **introduction**: the big question, the setting, the design, the headline result, and then a tight paragraph (or two) placing the paper in the literature, in **author-date (Chicago)** style. The job is to make one of QJE's five Harvard-based Editors see, in the first two pages, that the answer is new and important — because they desk-decide in ~2 weeks and desk-reject the majority. A survey-style "Section 2: Literature Review" is a field-journal habit and reads as off-template here. The model is how QJE landmark papers position: Mankiw, Romer & Weil (QJE 1992) staked their claim directly against Solow-model skeptics; Chetty–Hendren–Kline–Saez (QJE 2014) positioned against the whole intergenerational-mobility literature in a few paragraphs.

## The four positioning moves
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