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jpe-referee-strategy

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Use when running a pre-submission pre-mortem on a Journal of Political Economy (JPE) manuscript to anticipate the price-theory, general-equilibrium, and identification objections a Chicago referee will raise. Builds the threat list and pre-empts it; it does not write the R&R response (see jpe-rebuttal).

Journal-of-Political-Economy-Skills/skills/jpe-referee-strategy/SKILL.md

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# Referee Strategy & Pre-Mortem (jpe-referee-strategy)

## When to trigger

- Identification, model, and robustness are in place and you want to harden the paper before submitting
- You want to anticipate the report rather than react to it
- You sense a likely objection but have not addressed it in the text
- You are choosing how to frame the contribution to survive a demanding economics referee

## How JPE referees read

JPE referees read the paper as an **economic argument** and probe its internal consistency. The prototypical Chicago referee asks: does this respect optimization, prices, incentives, and equilibrium? They are unimpressed by a clean coefficient with no economic meaning, and they will name the alternative mechanism or the GE force you ignored. Anticipating these is worth more than any extra robustness table. The process is selective and demanding, and JPE-specific: a **co-editor** (the board is led by Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and weighted toward University of Chicago faculty) runs the desk screen; review is **single-blind** (referees know who you are); and the **$250 / $125 submission fee is non-refundable even on a desk reject**. A single unanswered first-order objection sinks a paper before that paid-for gate.

## The objection taxonomy (pre-empt each in the text)
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