From restat-skills
Anticipates REStat referee objections for empirical economics designs and maps threats to pre-emptive defenses, helping you stress-test manuscripts before submission.
How this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/restat-skills:restat-referee-strategyThe summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
- The design is settled and you want to pre-empt the obvious referee objections
REStat referees are applied economists who attack identification and measurement first. They ask: Is the design actually clean? Is everything measured well enough to support the claim? Would the result survive the specification I would run? Does the conclusion exceed the evidence? Because REStat publishes across many applied fields, expect a referee who knows your subfield's data quirks intimately. The winning manuscript answers the top objection inside the paper — one paragraph plus one exhibit — before the referee can raise it.
| Design | The objection a REStat referee raises first | Pre-empt with |
|---|---|---|
| DID (staggered) | "TWFE is biased with heterogeneous timing" | Het-robust estimator (CS / Sun–Abraham) + flat event-study + Bacon decomp |
| DID (any) | "Pre-trends / parallel trends fails" | Pre-trend tests + honest-DID bounds (Rambachan–Roth) |
| RD | "The running variable is manipulated" | Density test (CJM) + covariate smoothness + bandwidth sensitivity |
| IV | "Exclusion restriction is violated / instrument is weak" | Institutional + falsification defense of exclusion; effective-F; AR weak-IV sets |
| Shift-share | "Shares/shocks are endogenous" | GPSS share-exogeneity or BHJ shock-exogeneity argument + implied estimates |
| Any | "Your key variable is measured with error" | Validation sample / attenuation correction / bounds (REStat-signature) |
| Any | "Inference ignores clustering / few clusters / many tests" | Right clustering + wild-cluster bootstrap + MHT correction |
| Any | "The conclusion overreaches the estimate" | State the estimand and scope; bound external-validity claims |
restat-robustness for the suite, restat-tables-figures for presentation).A trade paper uses a shift-share instrument and the author is braced for the usual exogeneity questions. But the first objection a REStat referee raises is about measurement: the industry-share weights are built from a base-year census the referee believes is mismeasured for small sectors. Anticipating this, the author adds, in the main text, a one-paragraph defense plus one exhibit — re-estimating with shares from an independent survey and showing the estimate barely moves — before any referee sees the paper. The exogeneity question (shares vs shocks, BHJ) is handled in a second paragraph. By pre-empting the measurement objection, not just the identification one, the author removes the easiest path to a critical report — the REStat-specific move siblings often miss.
【Design】[DID / RD / IV / shift-share / measurement]
【Top objections (ranked)】1:[...] 2:[...] 3:[...] (4–6)
【Hardest answered in main text?】paragraph + exhibit? [Y/N]
【Measurement objection addressed?】[Y/N]
【Inference objection pre-empted?】[Y/N]
【Scope bounded?】external-validity claim limited? [Y/N]
【Main vs appendix budget】main: [...]; appendix: [...]
【Next step】restat-submission
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