ecj-robustness
Use when the main result of a The Economic Journal (EJ) manuscript rests on a single specification and you need to pre-empt the alternative-explanation and fragility objections a demanding referee will raise. Builds the robustness battery and the falsification logic; it does not establish the primary identification (see ecj-identification).
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill ecj-robustness --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Robustness & Alternative Explanations (ecj-robustness) ## When to trigger - The headline result is one regression with one set of choices - You have not ruled out the obvious competing economic explanations - A structural result has not been shown to survive perturbing key assumptions - You suspect a referee will say "this is fragile" or "this is mechanism A, not your mechanism B" ## The EJ logic of robustness At EJ, robustness is not a ritual table of "still significant." It is an argument that **the economic interpretation survives**, and that rival mechanisms are ruled out — and because the interpretation is what makes the result broadly interesting, fragility there is fatal. A demanding general-interest referee thinks adversarially: which alternative economic story produces the same coefficient, and how do you exclude it? Over-reliance on a single specification is an explicit anti-pattern. And because acceptance triggers the **EJ Data Editor** rerunning your code against the **Zenodo** deposit (RES policy, DCAS-endorsed; see `ecj-replication-package`), every robustness number must come from code that actually executes and reproduces — fragility you papered over will surface i
- When to trigger
- The EJ logic of robustness
- What to run
- Specification robustness
- Mechanism discrimination (the broad-interest part)
- External validity / structural papers
- Execution bridge (StatsPAI / Stata MCP)
- Checklist
- Anti-patterns
- Output format
What does the ecj-robustness skill do?
Use when the main result of a The Economic Journal (EJ) manuscript rests on a single specification and you need to pre-empt the alternative-explanation and fragility objections a demanding referee will raise. Builds the robustness battery and the falsification logic; it does not establish the primary identification (see ecj-identification).
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill ecj-robustness --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 984 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.