Writing Style (ier-writing-style)

When to trigger

• The intro states what the paper does but never what is new and general by the end of page two
• A theory paper's proofs crowd out the intuition a non-specialist needs
• The abstract describes the topic but not the result and the contribution
• Reviewers (or coauthors) say the writing is correct but the idea does not "come through"
• The draft is over the ≤50-page ceiling and the prose, not the analysis, is the bloat

The IER voice: rigorous, but legible to a broad audience

IER's audience is broad and rigor-leaning — a macro theorist, an econometrician, and an applied microeconomist may all referee it. So the writing must satisfy two masters: it must be formally precise (an IER referee will not forgive sloppy statements of results or assumptions) and legible across fields (the general reader must follow the mechanism without specialist priors). The house voice is not the breezy importance-pitch of a top-5 intro, nor the terse method-first prose of an Econometric Society paper — it is clear formal economics with the intuition kept in the text.

The introduction, IER-style (a four-move structure)