A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial, urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue.

MITAuto-check passedResearch & Science

Install Jue Topic Selection

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jue-topic-selection -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills jue-topic-selection --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/Journal-of-Urban-Economics-Skills/skills/jue-topic-selection .claude/skills/jue-topic-selection && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
jue-topic-selection
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~2.1k tokens
SKILL.md length
1,090 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial, urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue.

  • Works in 3 steps: Mechanism gate. Can you name a spatial… → Equilibrium gate. Does the question… → Marginal-contribution gate. Urban…
  • Deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial
  • SKILL.md covers When to trigger, Is this a JUE paper? The…, Sibling-boundary decision table and Choosing the article format, plus 7 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Jue Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial, urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue. Locks the spatial question and outlet fit before positioning; it does not write the literature review or design the identification.

Its SKILL.md is about 2.1k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Research & Science, covering Literature review. The repository describes itself as: Journal-specific Claude Code/Codex skill packs covering mainstream journals — AER, QJE, Nature, Cell, 管理世界, 经济研究 & 200+ more — your fast track to getting published. | 覆盖主流期刊的… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial
  • Urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue

Example prompts

  • “/jue-topic-selection”

Workflow steps

3 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Mechanism gate. Can you name a spatial mechanism — capitalization, agglomeration spillover, sorting across locations, congestion, market…
  2. Equilibrium gate. Does the question respect that people and firms move? A partial result that ignores spatial reallocation…
  3. Marginal-contribution gate. Urban economics is mature; "X affects house prices / city size / wages" is rarely enough. The novelty must be…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 932eb23. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Jue Topic Selection loads about 2.1k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 79 tokens; SKILL.md has 1,090 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~79
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~2.1k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills at commit 932eb23, republished under its MIT licence (© brycewang-stanford). 1,090 words, ~2,116 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/jue-topic-selection/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
jue-topic-selection
description
Use when deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial, urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue. Locks the spatial question and outlet fit before positioning; it does not write the literature review or design the identification.

Topic Selection (jue-topic-selection)

When to trigger

  • The question is interesting but it is unclear it is spatial — could it be a labor or public-finance paper that merely uses geographic data?
  • The paper sits on a boundary with RSUE, Journal of Regional Science, JEG (OUP), or JPubE and you must decide where it belongs
  • A reviewer or coauthor asks "why is this urban economics?" and the answer is thin
  • You have a clean result but no urban mechanism — only a geographic correlation
  • You are choosing between a full JUE article and the short-paper JUE: Insights track

Is this a JUE paper? The spatial-mechanism test

JUE publishes work where space is constitutive of the economics, not a label on the data. The question should turn on at least one spatial primitive: agglomeration economies, housing supply elasticity, land use & zoning, commuting/transportation, local public finance & Tiebout sorting, neighborhood effects, or spatial sorting/equilibrium. Run the manuscript through three gates:

  1. Mechanism gate. Can you name a spatial mechanism — capitalization, agglomeration spillover, sorting across locations, congestion, market access — that generates the result? If the mechanism is a-spatial (it would hold with units relabeled non-geographically), it is not a JUE paper.
  2. Equilibrium gate. Does the question respect that people and firms move? A partial result that ignores spatial reallocation (workers/firms/residents re-sorting) will draw the JUE referee's first objection. The contribution should engage spatial equilibrium even if reduced-form.
  3. Marginal-contribution gate. Urban economics is mature; "X affects house prices / city size / wages" is rarely enough. The novelty must be a new mechanism, a new spatial design, novel geocoded data, or a quantitatively important magnitude for urban policy.

Sibling-boundary decision table

If the paper's core is...It belongs at...because...
a spatial mechanism with urban data and an urban audienceJUEthe field flagship for urban & regional economics
methods/theory of regional science, broader spatial econometricsRSUE or J. of Regional ScienceJUE leads with the economics, not the spatial method per se
economic-geography framing, clusters, evolutionary geographyJEG (OUP)JEG is geography-leaning and non-Elsevier
the tax/spending design dominates; geography is the settingJPubEa place-based result is not automatically a public-finance contribution
a broad applied-micro causal result with a city settingAEJ: AppliedAEJ rewards the design; JUE wants the spatial mechanism too

Choosing the article format

  • Full JUE article — a complete contribution: design, mechanism, magnitudes, robustness, policy reading.
  • JUE: Insights — a focused, well-identified short result. Cap ≤6,000 words and ≤5 exhibits (each exhibit below five buys +200 words; a zero-exhibit paper ≤7,000 words) (检索于 2026-06;以官网为准). Use it for a single sharp finding (a clean policy evaluation, a measurement contribution) that does not need a full model. The track was launched to publish timely, tightly-identified short papers; do not pad a Insights-sized result into a full article to look weightier.

What gets desk-rejected at JUE

JUE is a high-volume field flagship and the editors desk-reject freely. The recurring desk-reject patterns are worth designing against from the start:

  • No spatial mechanism — a result that uses geographic units but whose economics is a-spatial (a labor or finance result that happens to be measured by city).
  • Setting mistaken for contribution — "the first study of [city/country]" with no new mechanism, design, data, or magnitude.
  • Wrong venue — a tax-design paper (JPubE), a spatial-method paper (RSUE), or an economic-geography paper (JEG) sent to JUE because it is "about cities."
  • Identification not credible for space — a cross-location OLS that any urban referee will read as sorting, presented as causal.
  • Stale question with no new angle — re-confirming a well-established urban regularity without moving the frontier.

Timeliness and the JUE: Insights niche

The Insights track was built for results that are sharp and timely — a clean evaluation of a recent policy, a measurement contribution, a decisive null. If your finding is one well-identified estimate that does not need a model and would lose force if delayed by a multi-year full-article cycle, Insights is the right home. Reserve the full article for contributions that need a model, a battery of mechanisms, or a quantitative-spatial counterfactual. Misjudging this — padding an Insights result or compressing a full contribution — is itself a fit error referees notice.

Show full SKILL.md (405 more words)Show less

Worked vignette (illustrative)

A team has clean admin data showing firms near a new university campus pay higher wages. Tempting framing: "agglomeration raises wages." But the mechanism gate exposes a sorting story — high-wage firms may have located near the campus. The JUE-viable reframing pins a mechanism: use the staggered campus openings as a shock to local knowledge spillovers, decompose the wage gain into sorting vs true spillover, and report the spillover magnitude relevant to place-based innovation policy. That is an agglomeration contribution; "firms near campuses pay more" is a desk-reject.

Checklist

  • A spatial mechanism is named in one sentence, and the result would not survive relabeling units non-geographically
  • The paper engages spatial equilibrium / reallocation rather than assuming a closed location
  • The marginal contribution is more than "X affects an urban outcome"
  • The sibling boundary (RSUE / JRS / JEG / JPubE / AEJ:Applied) is explicitly resolved
  • Format chosen (full article vs JUE: Insights) matches the scope of the result
  • The urban-policy or theory audience who would cite this paper is identifiable
  • The spatial resolution the design needs exists and is accessible (and depositable)
  • The result is not a known urban regularity re-confirmed with no new angle

Anti-patterns

  • A national/firm-level result run on county or city data with no spatial mechanism ("geographic data ≠ urban economics")
  • Ignoring that agents re-sort, so the estimated effect double-counts or omits general-equilibrium reallocation
  • Pitching to JUE a paper whose real contribution is a tax design (→ JPubE) or a spatial-econometrics method (→ RSUE)
  • Forcing a thin result into a full article when JUE: Insights fits better, or vice versa
  • Claiming "first paper to study X city" as if novelty of setting were novelty of contribution

Data-availability shapes feasibility — decide early

Urban questions are often constrained by what geography you can observe. Before committing, confirm the spatial resolution you need actually exists and is accessible: parcel/address-level for capitalization and boundary designs, establishment-level for agglomeration, tract/block for neighborhood effects, network/GTFS for transport. A question that requires geocoded individual data you cannot obtain (or cannot deposit under JUE's replication policy) is a topic-selection problem, not a later logistics detail — fold the data path and the replication route into the topic decision, and loop in jue-replication-package if the data is restricted.

Output format

text
【Spatial mechanism】one sentence — what space does in the economics
【JUE vs sibling】JUE / RSUE / JRS / JEG / JPubE / AEJ:Applied + one-line reason
【Format】full article / JUE: Insights
【Marginal contribution】mechanism / design / data / magnitude (pick the real one)
【Equilibrium engagement】how reallocation is handled
【Next skill】jue-literature-positioning

If the spatial-mechanism test fails, the fastest fix is rarely a new dataset — it is reframing the existing result around the spatial primitive (capitalization, sorting, agglomeration) that was always implicit but never made the point of the paper.

© brycewang-stanford, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in Journal-of-Urban-Economics-Skills/skills/jue-topic-selection of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Jue Topic Selection next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

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Literature Reviewneflibata-feng/MyArxiv-Agent12620 repos~5.9kAutomated safety check: NotesMIT
Preprint Search on bioRxivLigphiDonk/Oh-my--paper73812 repos~3.7kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Academic Paper Writing PipelineImbad0202/academic-research-skills51k—~16kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence

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Questions about Jue Topic Selection

What does Jue Topic Selection do?

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial, urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue. Jue Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial, urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue.

When should I use Jue Topic Selection?

Jue Topic Selection fits situations like: deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial; urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue.

How do I install Jue Topic Selection in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jue-topic-selection -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (Journal-of-Urban-Economics-Skills/skills/jue-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/jue-topic-selection in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Jue Topic Selection in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jue-topic-selection -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (Journal-of-Urban-Economics-Skills/skills/jue-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/jue-topic-selection in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Jue Topic Selection in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jue-topic-selection -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/jue-topic-selection, .gemini/skills/jue-topic-selection, .github/skills/jue-topic-selection and .opencode/skills/jue-topic-selection in your project.

What does Jue Topic Selection need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Jue Topic Selection is instructions for the agent only.

Does Jue Topic Selection access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Jue Topic Selection safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Jue Topic Selection use?

Jue Topic Selection is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Jue Topic Selection use?

About 2.1k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 8.5k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Jue Topic Selection?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Jue Topic Selection: Nature Paper Card (Yuan1z0825/nature-skills, 47k stars), Systematic Review Screener (Imbad0202/academic-research-skills, 51k stars), Literature Review (neflibata-feng/MyArxiv-Agent, 126 stars) and Preprint Search on bioRxiv (LigphiDonk/Oh-my--paper, 738 stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Jue Topic Selection?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,228 GitHub stars. The repository holds 2,387 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on September 27, 2026.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.