Tables & Figures — Five-Exhibit Budget (aeri-tables-figures)
When to trigger
- The draft has more than five figures-plus-tables
- An exhibit spills past one page, or carries significance asterisks/boldface
- Each exhibit costs 200 words of your text budget and you must choose
- The central result is buried in a dense multi-panel table
The AER: Insights exhibit constraints (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准)
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Maximum five exhibits (figures or tables combined). Manuscripts over the limit are returned unreviewed.
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Each exhibit is limited to one page.
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Each exhibit subtracts 200 words from the main-text allowance (7,000 with zero exhibits → 6,000 with five). So every exhibit must out-earn 200 words of prose.
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AEA house style: report standard errors / confidence sets; no asterisks or boldface to denote significance (an AEA-wide convention). Notes state the estimator, sample, clustering, and units.
Budgeting the five slots
Choose the exhibit set that, together, tells the single-insight story. A common allocation for an empirical short paper:
| Slot |
Typical content |
| 1 |
The headline result — the one figure or table a reader remembers (event-study, RD plot, treatment-effect estimate) |
| 2 |
The central identification diagnostic (pre-trend leads, density, first-stage, balance) |
| 3 |
A mechanism or key heterogeneity exhibit, if it is part of the single insight |
| 4–5 |
Held in reserve — a robustness summary or a descriptive table only if load-bearing |
If two exhibits can merge into one well-designed multi-panel page, merge them and reclaim a slot (and 200 words). Everything else goes to the Supplemental Appendix.
Design rules
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The headline exhibit must be self-reading — a reader who sees only it should grasp the insight.
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Figures over tables where a figure communicates the magnitude faster (AER: Insights papers lean visual).
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One page each, legible at print size; no microscopic multi-panel grids spilling over.
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Notes carry the inference since there are no asterisks: report point estimates with SEs / 95% confidence sets in the cell or note.
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Units and signs explicit; the magnitude, not just the sign, is the point.
Execution bridge (StatsPAI / Stata MCP)
Generate exhibits from the fitted result, not by retyping numbers (the usual source of
body-vs-appendix drift). Full map: execution-with-mcp.
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Tables:
etable (multi-model columns) or did_summary_to_latex straight from the
result_id — one variable definition, one set of numbers, body and appendix in sync.
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Figures:
plot_from_result / enhanced_event_study_plot / event_study_table —
axis units and the SE/clustering note baked in.
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Every note names the estimator + clustering (from the result's diagnostics) and
states the magnitude in interpretable units.
See a full fitted-result → exhibit chain in the JF execution walkthrough.
Checklist
Anti-patterns
- A sixth exhibit (auto-return) or an exhibit that runs to two pages
- Significance asterisks or boldface for significance
- A dense table where a single figure would land the magnitude
- Spending an exhibit slot (and 200 words) on a descriptive table that prose covers
- A headline exhibit that needs the text to be intelligible
Output format
【Exhibit count】__ / 5 (each ≤1 page?)
【Word reconciliation】7000 − 200×__ = __ words available; draft = __ words
【Exhibit 1 (headline)】<self-reading result>
【Exhibit 2 (identification)】<diagnostic>
【Exhibits 3–5】<mechanism / robustness / descriptive — only if load-bearing>
【No-asterisk check】SEs / CIs in notes? [Y/N]
【To the appendix】<exhibits demoted>
【Next step】aeri-writing-style
