jhe-literature-positioning

• SKILL.mdcore · 7,879 bytes

# Literature Positioning (jhe-literature-positioning)

## When to trigger

- A referee or coauthor cannot state in one sentence what this paper adds beyond known health-econ results
- The literature review reads like a list, not an argument about the frontier
- The paper cites general applied-micro work but misses the canonical health-econ findings it must engage
- The contribution is framed against a generic economics literature instead of the health-economics one

## Positioning at JHE

JHE referees are health economists; they hold the field's landmark results in their head and will reject a paper that re-derives a known coverage or moral-hazard effect with a new dataset. The contribution must be staked against the **health-economics frontier specifically** — the insurance-design, provider-incentive, behavior, or human-capital literature your result speaks to — and the marginal contribution must survive the question "a health economist already knows X; what is new?" Position on **one of**: a new mechanism, a new margin (e.g., intensive vs. extensive care use), a credibly-identified magnitude where prior estimates were confounded, a new setting that changes external validity, or a policy counterfactual prior work could not run.

## How to build the positioning argument