AER Pre-Registration

Overview

For experimental and prospective-data AER-track work, credibility is bought before the data exist. This skill writes the pre-analysis plan (PAP), sizes the sample from a power calculation, and registers the study. Its job is to make the eventual results un-p-hackable: a referee who sees a public PAP timestamp predating data collection cannot accuse you of specification search.

Registration is not optional at AEA journals for RCTs. If the design is observational, skip to aer-robustness; there is nothing to pre-register.

When to Use