restat-referee-strategy
Use when anticipating the objections a The Review of Economics and Statistics (REStat) referee will raise for a given design, and pre-empting them in the manuscript before submission. Maps threats to defenses; it does not draft the post-decision response letter (that is restat-rebuttal).
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill restat-referee-strategy --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.
# Referee Strategy (restat-referee-strategy) ## When to trigger - The design is settled and you want to pre-empt the obvious referee objections - You need to decide which robustness checks belong in the paper vs the online appendix - You want to write the intro/robustness so a referee's first question is already answered - Before submission, to stress-test the manuscript against a REStat referee's mindset ## The REStat referee mindset REStat referees are **applied economists who attack identification and measurement first**. They ask: *Is the design actually clean? Is everything measured well enough to support the claim? Would the result survive the specification I would run? Does the conclusion exceed the evidence?* Because REStat publishes across many applied fields, expect a referee who knows your subfield's data quirks intimately. The winning manuscript **answers the top objection inside the paper** — one paragraph plus one exhibit — before the referee can raise it. ## Threat → pre-emption map by design | Design | The objection a REStat referee raises first | Pre-empt with | |--------|---------------------------------------------|---------------| | DID (staggered) | "TWFE is bi
- When to trigger
- The REStat referee mindset
- Threat → pre-emption map by design
- Strategy moves
- Checklist
- Anti-patterns
- Worked vignette: pre-empting the measurement objection (illustrative)
- Output format
What does the restat-referee-strategy skill do?
Use when anticipating the objections a The Review of Economics and Statistics (REStat) referee will raise for a given design, and pre-empting them in the manuscript before submission. Maps threats to defenses; it does not draft the post-decision response letter (that is restat-rebuttal).
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill restat-referee-strategy --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 909 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.