Ier Replication Package

Replication Package and Proof Appendix (ier-replication-package)

When to trigger

• The paper has empirical, simulation, or experimental work and acceptance will hinge on a compliant deposit
• You are at conditional acceptance and the letter asks for data, programs, and a README
• Key proofs are scattered in the body, in footnotes, or assumed — and the appendix is not self-contained
• A referee questions whether the results can be reproduced from what you provide
• You need to know exactly what IER's data policy requires vs. what is optional

IER's policy, precisely

IER adopted the American Economic Review (AER) data availability policy effective January 1, 2022 (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准). The operative facts:

• It is journal policy to publish a paper only if its data are clearly documented and readily available to any researcher for replication.
• On conditional acceptance, authors deposit data, programs, and enough detail to permit replication in electronic form at a standard public repository the acceptance letter names, and include a data availability statement with a link to the repository in the final paper.
• If data are proprietary or the requirement otherwise cannot be met, the Editor must be notified at the time of submission — not at acceptance.

What the deposit must contain, by paper type

This is a post-acceptance deposit, not a submission-time upload — but assemble it early, because a clean package is also the most persuasive robustness evidence to a referee mid-review.

The proof appendix (the theory/structural obligation)

Because IER tilts theory/structural, the proof appendix is part of the contribution, not boilerplate. The standard a referee holds it to:

• Self-contained. Every proof states the result, the assumptions invoked, and runs without the reader reconstructing steps. Do not prove a key result only in a footnote or by "similar to above."
• Each formal claim has a proof or a precise citation. Lemmas used must be proved or referenced to a stated source.
• Numerical/computational appendix. For structural work, document the solution algorithm, grids, tolerances, solver, and seeds so the counterfactual is reproducible — this complements the code deposit.
• Online vs. main appendix. Move long proofs and secondary derivations to an online appendix to respect the ≤50-page main-text ceiling, but the main results must remain provable from the main paper plus appendix.

Why the deposit is also a mid-review asset

The AER-style deposit is formally a post-acceptance requirement, but assembling it early pays off during review, not just after. A referee who can see a clean, runnable replication package is far more likely to trust the empirical claims and the robustness section — the package is itself the strongest possible answer to "can this be reproduced?" Authors who wait until conditional acceptance to build the package often discover that constructed variables cannot be traced to raw data, or that a result depended on an undocumented manual step; finding that during review (when you can still fix it) is far better than at acceptance (when it delays publication).

Worked example (illustrative)

A structural paper's counterfactual is computed by a solver with hand-tuned starting values and an unrecorded grid. At conditional acceptance the authors try to assemble the deposit and cannot reproduce their own headline welfare number to the second decimal. The lesson IER's policy enforces: the computational appendix (algorithm, grids, tolerances, solver, seeds) is not paperwork — it is the only thing that makes the result a result rather than a one-time output. Documenting it while the code is fresh, and depositing the exact scripts, is what lets a referee — and a future reader — regenerate the number on demand.