From jleo-skills
Anticipates referee objections for JLEO manuscript submissions by modeling the institutional/organizational economist reviewer and pre-empting common criticisms.
How this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/jleo-skills:jleo-referee-strategyThe summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
- The paper is near submission and you want to see it through a JLEO referee's eyes first
JLEO referees are drawn from the institutional and organizational economics and PPE communities — people fluent in transaction-cost economics, contract theory, and the political economy of institutions. They are unusually attentive to two things generic economics referees are not: (1) whether the institutional mechanism is real and named, and (2) whether the empirical object — usually chosen by the agents — is credibly identified despite that choice. Model the reviewer, then pre-empt.
| Likely referee objection | Pre-empt by |
|---|---|
| "This is applied micro dressed as institutional economics" | Make the institutional mechanism the headline; show the result speaks to a JLEO frontier (jleo-literature-positioning) |
| "Governance form is endogenous — you've measured selection" | Address selection head-on with IV / selection model / shock; bound it (jleo-identification, jleo-robustness) |
| "The model adds notation but no prediction the intuition lacked" | Make comparative statics the deliverable; flag the surprising one (jleo-theory-model) |
| "Reform timing is endogenous to the outcome" | Show timing exogeneity, anticipation tests, clean event-study leads |
| "Your institutional measure is not valid" | Validate the construct with alternative measures; document coding (jleo-replication-package) |
| "An alternative mechanism explains this" | Include a test only your mechanism predicts |
| "This belongs at JLE / Org Science" | State the organization/PPE payoff that makes it JLEO, not a sibling |
A paper argues that delegating rule-making to an independent agency improves regulatory quality. Anticipating the JLEO referee: the fatal objection is endogeneity — legislatures delegate precisely where they expect quality gains, so the estimate may be selection. The author pre-empts by exploiting a constitutional change that forced delegation for a subset of policy areas regardless of expected gain, places the design in Section 3 where any referee looks first, and writes the cover-letter limitation that external validity is bounded to the affected areas. The second-order objection ("this is political science, not JLEO") gets a ready paragraph: the payoff is a PPE claim about the credible-commitment value of delegation — squarely the North–Weingast line — with formal comparative statics, making it JLEO and not QJPS.
【Top 3 anticipated objections】1) ___ 2) ___ 3) ___
【Severity】fatal (fix now) / fixable (table/footnote)
【Pre-empt location in MS】where each defense lives
【Sibling-boundary answer】why JLEO not JLE/Org Science (one paragraph ready)
【Cover-letter limitations】what to flag transparently
【Suggested reviewers】TCE/PPE scholars; conflicts noted
【Next skill】jleo-submission
npx claudepluginhub brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills --plugin jleo-skillsAnticipates and pre-empts objections from law-and-economics referees at The Journal of Law and Economics (JLE). Guides manuscript pre-submission defense and R&R response planning.
Anticipates and pre-empts objections from Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO) referees before submission — demand effects, mechanism-vs-alternative, external validity, sibling-journal fit. Helps triage fatal vs. addressable issues.
Anticipates and pre-empts referee objections for Economic Journal manuscripts. Focuses on broad interest, identification, and mechanism concerns.