Contribution Framing (jie-contribution-framing)

When to trigger

• The results exist but the "so what / what's new" is not crisp
• A referee might say "incremental" or "not original enough"
• You need to state the contribution in JIE's own terms before writing the intro

JIE's originality gate

JIE accepts both empirical and theoretical work, but it must be original in its motivation or modelling structure. This is the exact bar to frame against — not "important" or "policy-relevant" in the abstract, but new in motivation or new in modelling. Choose the axis your paper actually delivers on:

• Motivation originality: a new international-economics question, a new fact, or new data the field did not have — e.g., a novel tariff/NTM dataset, firm-level customs records, a new measure of capital flows, exchange-rate pass-through, or sovereign-spread dynamics. Frame it as "the field believed/assumed X; with [new data/fact] we show Y."
• Modelling originality: a non-trivial new mechanism or structure — e.g., a new ingredient in an Eaton–Kortum/Melitz trade model, a new channel in a small-open-economy DSGE, or a new sovereign-default mechanism. Frame it as "existing models cannot generate Z; our structure does, and it matters quantitatively because [counterfactual]."

Frame for the right half of the field

JIE's readership is split between trade and international macro/finance. State which half you are addressing and pitch the contribution in that half's currency (a trade elasticity / welfare gain, or a pass-through / cyclicality / default moment). A contribution invisible to your half's referees will read as incremental even if it is not.

A one-paragraph contribution statement

Write a single paragraph that names: (1) the international-economics question, (2) the originality axis (motivation or modelling), (3) the concrete novelty (data/fact or mechanism), (4) the headline quantitative result, and (5) why it matters for the field. This paragraph should survive almost verbatim into the introduction and align with the ≤150-word abstract.

Anti-patterns

• Framing on importance/policy relevance instead of motivation/modelling originality
• Claiming both motivation and modelling novelty when the paper delivers neither sharply
• A contribution legible only to the other half of the field
• "First paper to study [country/period]" as the entire novelty
• A framing the results cannot actually support (over-claiming)

Worked framing example (illustrative)

A firm-level tariff-war paper. Weak framing: "this is an important and timely study of trade policy." JIE-grade framing names the axis and the currency: "The field measured the tariff war at the aggregate level; with firm-level customs records (motivation originality) we show the export contraction is concentrated in [margin], implying a trade elasticity of about [X] — illustrative — that revises the welfare cost downward." It declares the trade half, leads with a magnitude, and claims originality on one axis (motivation), not both. The same result framed for the macro-finance half — pass-through or current-account currency — would read as incremental to a trade referee, so frame for the half that will referee it.

Contribution pass for Journal of International Economics

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the cross-border margin, model or identification source, and replication/data readiness; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: international-economics reviewers who separate trade, open-economy macro, international finance, and sovereign-risk audiences.

• Do the pass: Translate the result into who learns what, which mechanism changes, and which alternative explanation is ruled out; keep the contribution narrower than the evidence.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against JPubE for public-finance policy, JDE for development settings, JME for monetary macro emphasis; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Question】(one line, international-economics)
【Originality axis】motivation / modelling structure
【Concrete novelty】new data-fact / new mechanism
【Headline result】(quantitative)
【Field half】trade / macro-finance + why it matters there
【One-paragraph statement】(drafted, intro-ready)
【Next step】jie-tables-figures or jie-writing-style

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — data and model toolkits that often constitute the novelty
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — scope and originality-gate sources