American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (aej-applied-economics)

Journal positioning

AEJ: Applied Economics is the American Economic Association's home for empirical applied microeconomics one tier below AER's general-interest bar. It publishes credible, well-identified empirical work — labor, development, health, education, and adjacent applied fields — where the design is clean and the economic magnitudes are meaningful. The contribution can be field-specific rather than discipline-wide, but the identification and execution must be top-quality; this is where excellent applied micro that is "too narrow for AER" belongs.

This skill is a fit / venue-selection / re-framing tool. It does not replace the journal's current official submission guidelines. Before submitting, re-check the live author instructions on the AEA site and the editorial-manager submission system.

When to trigger

• The author names AEJ: Applied as the target, or is stepping down from an AER applied-micro submission.
• A paper has a credible quasi-experimental or field-experimental design in labor, development, health, or education with meaningful magnitudes.
• A strong applied paper is excellent but narrower than AER's general-interest bar and needs the right applied home.
• The author needs AEJ: Applied's desk-reject risks and a credible AER / applied-field alternative list.

Scope & topic fit

• Applied microeconomics with credible causal identification — labor, development, health, education, environment, and household behavior.
• Field experiments (RCTs) and natural/quasi-experiments exploiting policy changes, shocks, or discontinuities.
• Empirical papers whose value is a clean design answering a well-posed applied question, with economically interpretable effects.
• Reduced-form work; lighter on heavy structural modeling than AEJ: Micro or general-interest venues.

Method & evidence bar

• Identification is the central filter: the design (RCT, DiD, IV, RDD) must be credible and pre-empt the obvious threats by design, not by robustness tables alone.
• Modern estimators and inference are baseline — proper DiD under staggered treatment, valid first stages, RDD density/covariate-smoothness checks, correct standard errors.
• Effects must be economically meaningful, not merely significant; magnitudes, mechanisms, and external validity are evaluated.
• Data and code transparency is mandatory; the AEA data and code availability and verification policy applies, with deposit checked before acceptance.

Structure & house style

• The introduction states the applied question, the identification strategy, the headline effect and its magnitude, and what we learn that we did not before.
• Lead with the design and the clean estimate; develop mechanism and heterogeneity as support, with secondary analyses in an online appendix.
• AEJ uses an unstructured abstract and JEL codes; robustness and supplementary tables belong in the appendix.
• Exhibits should report magnitudes and let the central estimate be read from one table or figure.

Official-submission checklist

• Before giving submission-ready advice, read ../../resources/source-basis.md and ../../resources/official-source-map.md; start from the official source anchors for this journal family, then cite the current journal-specific page you checked.
• Search the live site for "AEJ: Applied Economics submission guidelines" and the AEA "Data and Code Availability Policy," and follow the current versions.
• Re-check the submission fee, formatting, abstract/JEL, anonymization, and figure/table standards on the editorial-manager system.
• Re-check the current data/code deposit and verification workflow (openICPSR / AEA Data Editor), and for RCTs any pre-registration / trial-registry and pre-analysis-plan expectations — enforced before acceptance.
• If the live official instructions conflict with this skill, the official instructions win.

Pre-submission self-check

• One sentence stating the applied question and why the identification is credible.
• The contribution is stated as identification + meaningful magnitude, not as statistical significance.
• The introduction positions the paper against the recent applied-micro frontier on this question.
• Identification threats are addressed by design; estimators, inference, and (for RCTs) pre-registration are state-of-the-art.
• Data and code are ready for the AEA availability + verification workflow.

Common desk-reject triggers

• A correlational or weakly-identified design dressed up as causal.
• Naive TWFE on staggered adoption, weak IV, or RDD without density/covariate diagnostics.
• A statistically significant but economically tiny or uninterpretable effect.
• "First to study X in context Y" with no design advance, mechanism, or generalizable lesson.

Re-routing decision

• General-interest applied importance → american-economic-review; a single crisp result → aer-insights.
• Policy-evaluation framing with policy-relevant magnitudes → aej-economic-policy or journal-of-public-economics.
• Heavy structural / quantitative micro → aej-microeconomics; careful measurement / short empirical → review-of-economics-and-statistics.
• Field-leading specialist work → the relevant top field journal (journal-of-labor-economics, journal-of-health-economics, journal-of-development-economics).

Output format

[Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason)
[Target] American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
[Topic tags] <2–3 closest topics>
[Method/evidence] <does the identification + magnitude clear the applied-micro bar?>
[Top risk] <the single most likely reason for rejection>
[Official items to re-check] <submission system / fee / JEL / data-code policy / pre-registration>
[Re-route suggestion] <if not a fit, a better-matched venue>