Individual skill
ier-identification
Use when the identification argument is the bottleneck for an International Economic Review (IER) manuscript — structural parameter identification, empirical causal identification, or for a theory result, what makes it tightly pinned. Stress-tests the data-to-object mapping to IER's rigor bar; it does not run the estimation.
International-Economic-Review-Skills/skills/ier-identification/SKILL.md
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# Identification Strategy (ier-identification)
## When to trigger
- A structural model's parameters are estimated but it is unclear *what in the data* identifies each one
- The headline counterfactual is suspected to be driven by a calibrated elasticity nobody defends
- An empirical causal claim rests on OLS + controls, or TWFE on staggered timing
- A referee says the result is "calibration in disguise" or "not credibly identified"
- For a theory paper, you need to confirm the result is *pinned* (which assumption identifies it) — though the tightness craft lives in `ier-theory-model`
## The IER identification bar
IER prizes a **clean model-to-evidence link**, so identification is judged by one test: is the **mapping from data to the object of interest explicit and defended**? The object differs by branch, and so does what "identified" means. Pick the branch and make the mapping transparent — a referee should be able to point at the data feature that moves each estimate.
