Jeem Referee Strategy

Referee Strategy (jeem-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

• The paper is near submission and you want to find the holes a field referee will hit first
• A coauthor asks "what will the referees attack?" on a hedonic, DiD, or valuation paper
• You need to decide which robustness checks to put in the main text vs. appendix to pre-empt referees
• An R&R is coming and you want to model the two-referee-plus-editor dynamic before drafting responses

The self-review pass before submission

Before submitting, read your own paper as a hostile field referee for one hour and write the report you fear. The exercise surfaces the objections the writing has trained you to skip: the buffer radius you never justified, the spatial SEs you computed but buried, the welfare claim that quietly became "total" when the design only identifies "marginal," the recent JAERE paper you half-remember and never cited. Every objection you can pre-answer in the submitted draft is one the actual referee cannot use to send the paper back. This self-review is the cheapest revision round you will ever run.

Who referees at JEEM

JEEM referees are environmental and resource economists — they have run the hedonic, fought the spatial-SE battle, and read the valuation-bias literature. They are reflexively skeptical of (a) causal claims that ignore sorting or spatial confounding, (b) valuation estimates that ignore known biases, (c) welfare numbers that overreach the design, and (d) papers where the environment is decoration. Anticipate the field reflex, not the generic applied-micro reflex.

The objections to pre-empt by branch

Strategy craft

1. Put the field's favorite robustness check in the main text, not the appendix. Spatial SEs and the event-study plot are not optional extras at JEEM — burying them invites the referee to assume you are hiding something.
2. Concede the design's true limits in the paper. Naming the boundary of your welfare claim (marginal not total, PE not GE, local not external) disarms the referee who would otherwise score the point.
3. Anticipate the second referee. Reviews often pit a methods-focused referee against a policy-focused one; serve both — design credibility and a usable policy number.
4. Map likely cites you missed. A JEEM referee will know the recent JEEM/JAERE paper on your exact question; engage it before they force you to.
5. Decide the editor's risk. Editors desk-screen for scope and style; an environmental mechanism that is not load-bearing is the fastest path to a desk reject — fix that before worrying about referee minutiae.

Worked vignette (illustrative)

A hedonic paper on Superfund cleanup is going out. Modeling the referees: a field referee will reflexively say "this is sorting, not capitalization" and "your SEs ignore spatial correlation"; a policy referee will ask "what is the implied benefit-cost ratio of cleanup?" The pre-emptive strategy: put the boundary-discontinuity specification and the parallel pre-cleanup price trends in the main text (answering R1's sorting reflex), report Conley SEs at two cutoffs in the headline table (answering the spatial reflex before it is raised), and add a benefit-cost paragraph translating the capitalization estimate into cleanup welfare (serving R2). The editor's scope screen is satisfied because the air/soil-quality externality is unmistakably the engine. Each likely objection is answered before it is voiced.