aer-paper-bodylisted

# AER Paper Body ## Overview The introduction decides whether the editor sends the paper out; the **body sections decide what the referees write**. Referees spend most of their time in Data, Empirical Strategy, and Results — checking whether the estimand is defined, the assumption is stated, the magnitudes are interpreted, and the prose matches the tables. This skill covers everything between the introduction and the bibliography. Write the body **before** polishing the introduction. The introduction summarizes a paper that already exists; drafting it first produces promises the body then fails to keep. ## When to Use - The empirics are stable (after `aer-identification` and `aer-robustness`) and the manuscript needs full section drafts - A results section reads like a table walk-through ("Column 1 shows... Column 2 shows...") and needs narration surgery - A referee or editor said the paper is "hard to follow," "under-interpreted," or "reads like a report" - Coefficients are reported but never converted into economic magnitudes - The conclusion restates the abstract and needs to do real work ## Canonical Section Architecture A full-length empirical AER paper, after the unlabeled introduction: ``` I. Background (or: Institutional Setting; Policy Context) II. Data (sources, sample construction, measurement, summary stats) III. Empirical Strategy (estimand, equation, identifying assumption, inference) IV. Results (main estimates, dynamics, robustn