American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (aej-economic-policy)

Journal positioning

AEJ: Economic Policy is the American Economic Association's field home for policy-relevant applied economics one tier below AER's general-interest bar. It publishes credible evaluations of public, health, education, environmental, and tax/transfer policy — work where the identification is sound and the magnitudes speak directly to a policy question. The contribution is the policy lesson backed by clean causal evidence; this is the home for excellent policy-evaluation papers that are narrower than an AER general-interest swing.

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: Policy as the target, or is stepping down from an AER policy submission.
• A paper credibly evaluates a policy — tax, transfer, regulation, public program, health, education, environment — with policy-relevant magnitudes.
• A strong applied paper has a clear policy reading and needs a venue that prizes policy relevance plus identification.
• The author needs AEJ: Policy's desk-reject risks and a credible AER / public-economics alternative list.

Scope & topic fit

• Public economics and the design/evaluation of taxes, transfers, social insurance, and public programs.
• Health, education, and environmental/energy policy evaluation with credible identification.
• Regulation, market design in the public interest, and the distributional and welfare consequences of policy.
• Applied work where the policy question and its quantitative answer are the contribution, not a methodological novelty.

Method & evidence bar

• Identification plus policy relevance is the joint filter: the design (RCT, DiD, IV, RDD, bunching) must be credible and the estimated effects must map onto a real policy parameter.
• Modern estimators and inference are baseline — proper DiD under staggered policy adoption, valid instruments, RDD diagnostics, correct standard errors.
• Magnitudes must be interpreted in policy terms (cost-effectiveness, welfare, incidence, behavioral responses), not left as significant coefficients.
• 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 policy question, the identification, the headline effect and its policy-relevant magnitude, and the lesson for policy design.
• Lead with the design and the policy-relevant estimate; develop welfare/distributional implications and mechanisms 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 in interpretable units and connect estimates to the policy counterfactual.

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: Economic Policy 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 experiments any pre-registration / 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 policy question and why the answer matters for policy design.
• [ ] The contribution is stated as identification + policy-relevant magnitude, not as statistical significance.
• [ ] The introduction positions the paper against the recent policy-evaluation frontier on this question.
• [ ] Identification threats are addressed by design; magnitudes are interpreted in welfare/incidence/cost terms.
• [ ] Data and code are ready for the AEA availability + verification workflow.

Common desk-reject triggers

• A policy "evaluation" with weak or correlational identification.
• Naive TWFE on staggered policy adoption, weak IV, or RDD without density/covariate diagnostics.
• Significant effects with no policy-relevant magnitude, welfare reading, or design lesson.
• A descriptive policy commentary with no credible causal evidence.

Re-routing decision

• General-interest policy importance → american-economic-review; one crisp policy result → aer-insights.
• Core public-economics field-leading → journal-of-public-economics; European policy-debate framing → economic-policy.
• Applied micro where design (not policy) is the headline → aej-applied-economics; careful measurement / shorter → review-of-economics-and-statistics.
• Field-specific policy → the relevant top field journal (journal-of-health-economics, journal-of-environmental-economics-and-management, journal-of-labor-economics).

Output format

[Fit] High / Medium / Low (one-line reason)
[Target] American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
[Topic tags] <2–3 closest topics>
[Method/evidence] <does the identification + policy-relevant magnitude clear the 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>