Ier Referee Strategy

Referee Strategy (ier-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

• The paper is near submission and you want to find the objection that would sink it before a referee does
• You are deciding what to put in the paper vs. hold in reserve for the response
• A draft is strong but you suspect one undefended assumption or one fragile number is the soft spot
• You want to calibrate expectations for IER's review (a rigor-gated, theory-leaning process)

How IER referees read

An IER referee is usually a rigor-minded economist who reads for whether the contribution is correct, general, and tightly linked to its evidence. Unlike a top-5 referee, they are not primarily asking "is this important enough"; they are asking "is this right, and does it teach a general lesson." The most common reasons an IER paper stalls are: an undefended load-bearing assumption, identification that is "calibration in disguise," a headline number that moves under a reasonable perturbation, or a proof that is not airtight. Pre-empt by archetype:

The pre-mortem routine

1. Name the single objection most likely to sink the paper. Be honest — it is usually the assumption or number you are quietly worried about.
2. Decide: fix in the paper, or address in the cover/response. A load-bearing weakness must be fixed before submission; a foreseeable-but-defensible concern can be flagged proactively in the cover letter.
3. Pre-empt in the text. For each likely objection, place the defense where the referee will look (next to the claim), not buried in an appendix they may not reach.
4. Write the cover letter to the desk editor's filing decision. The cover letter's job is to make the general-interest case so the paper is not mis-filed as a field-journal or Econometric Society paper (the boundary from ier-literature-positioning).
5. Reserve, don't withhold. Have additional robustness ready for the response, but never hide a known weakness — IER referees punish concealment harder than honest limitation.

Calibrating expectations for an IER review

IER's review is rigor-gated, so the realistic outcomes skew toward "revise to make it correct and general" rather than "reject because not important enough." The desk filter is the first hurdle — the editor decides whether the paper is general-interest enough for IER or belongs at a field journal / an Econometric Society outlet, which is why the cover letter's general-interest framing matters so much. Past the desk, expect referees to drill on the single load-bearing assumption and the identification; a paper that pre-empts those two cleanly converts to an R&R far more often than one that is broad but loose. Process timing and exact desk-reject rates are 待核实 — do not promise the user a timeline.

Worked example (illustrative)

An author is quietly worried that the headline elasticity is calibrated rather than estimated. The pre-mortem names this as the sink-objection. Rather than hope the referee misses it, the author adds a short subsection showing what data moment would identify the elasticity if estimated, reports the result holds across the calibrated range, and flags in the cover letter that the parameter is set externally for a stated reason with a sensitivity analysis attached. The known weakness is now a controlled, disclosed design choice — the worst it can draw is "please estimate it," which is a survivable R&R comment, not the fatal "calibration in disguise" reject.