Individual skill
jpe-robustness
Use when the main result of a Journal of Political Economy (JPE) manuscript rests on a single specification and you need to pre-empt the alternative-explanation and fragility objections a Chicago referee will raise. Builds the robustness battery and the falsification logic; it does not establish the primary identification (see jpe-identification).
Journal-of-Political-Economy-Skills/skills/jpe-robustness/SKILL.md
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# Robustness & Alternative Explanations (jpe-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 JPE logic of robustness
At JPE, 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. A Chicago 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 a conditional accept triggers the **JPE Data Editor** rerunning your code against the **JPE Dataverse** deposit (JPE endorses DCAS; see `jpe-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.