jpube-topic-selection - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: jpube-topic-selection description: Use when assessing whether a research question fits the Journal of Public Economics (JPubE) — the economic role of government (taxation, public expenditure, social insurance, redistribution, externalities, public goods, fiscal policy) — and whether the policy stakes clear the bar for an international readership. Scopes the question; it does not run the analysis.

Topic Selection (jpube-topic-selection)

When to trigger

You have data or a result but are unsure it is a public-economics paper
The question is interesting empirically but the government-role angle is unclear
You are choosing between a general-interest framing and a public-finance framing
You need to decide whether JPubE or a generalist / specialty field journal fits

The JPubE fit bar

JPubE was founded in 1972 by Tony Atkinson to be the home for rigorous analysis of the economic role of government, and under current Editors Nathaniel Hendren and Wojciech Kopczuk it still rewards exactly that: a question about how government policy affects behavior, welfare, or the distribution of resources, answered with modern theory and quantitative methods and a lesson that travels to an international readership. A strong JPubE topic sits squarely in one of the field's pillars:

Taxation — labor-supply and taxable-income elasticities, optimal tax, tax avoidance/evasion, corporate and capital taxation, bunching at kinks/notches
Social insurance & transfers — UI, DI, health insurance, pensions, EITC, means-tested programs, moral hazard vs. insurance-value trade-offs
Public expenditure & public goods — provision, valuation, crowd-out, place-based and in-kind transfers
Externalities & corrective policy — environmental taxes, sin taxes, regulation, fiscal federalism
Redistribution & inequality — incidence, mobility, the equity-efficiency frontier

Fit diagnostics

Government-role test: can you name the policy lever and the margin it moves in one sentence? If the paper is really a labor or IO paper with a tax control, it may be off-fit.
Welfare hook: public economics prizes a normative or efficiency interpretation (deadweight loss, MVPF, sufficient statistics), not just a reduced-form coefficient.
International readership: a single-country institutional curiosity needs a transportable lesson; otherwise a national field journal may fit better.
Frontier, not folklore: the answer should update what economists believe about a first-order policy question.

Checklist

The question is about the economic role of government, stated in one sentence
It maps to a JPubE pillar (tax / social insurance / expenditure / externality / redistribution)
There is a welfare, efficiency, or distributional interpretation, not only a coefficient
The lesson generalizes beyond one country's idiosyncratic rule
A smart non-specialist policy economist would care about the answer

Anti-patterns

A labor/IO/macro paper with a public-finance veneer added only to target JPubE
A descriptive policy evaluation with no efficiency or welfare lesson
An institutional case study with no transportable implication for an international audience
Over-claiming a global optimal-policy conclusion from a narrow local estimate

Fit pass for Journal of Public Economics

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the policy instrument, affected margin, identification design, and welfare or incidence interpretation; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: public economists who ask whether policy design, fiscal incidence, or welfare interpretation is credible.

Do the pass: Score the manuscript on venue fit, novelty, evidence readiness, and audience ownership; reject a prestige-only target when a sibling venue owns the contribution more directly.
Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
Sibling guard: compare against JDE for development policy, JIE for cross-border policy, AEJ Economic Policy for broad policy readership; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Question】one sentence (policy lever + margin)
【JPubE pillar】tax / social insurance / expenditure / externality / redistribution
【Welfare hook】DWL / MVPF / sufficient stat / incidence / none-yet
【International lesson】[...]
【Fit verdict】strong / borderline / off-fit
【Next step】jpube-contribution-framing