Economics
Economics research, evaluated on the identification
How economic judgment shows outside a working-paper series, and the standard the founding cohort will hold it to. Everything below is a draft in public, on purpose.
What counts as evidence of economics research skill
Economics has run on public working papers longer than most social sciences — NBER and SSRN circulate results years before journal publication — so an evaluator can read a paper's identification strategy and robustness checks directly, without waiting for a referee's verdict to stand in for judgment.
Outside academia, the same skills run policy shops, central banks, and the economics teams inside tech companies: causal-inference work behind a pricing decision, a forecasting model whose backtests are honestly reported, an internal memo estimating an intervention's effect with the counterfactual stated plainly. That work is evaluable even when it is confidential in its details but public in its method.
The hardest thing to see from a CV is whether an identification strategy actually closes off the alternative explanations it claims to. That judgment — instrument relevance, parallel trends, discontinuity validity — is exactly what a structured read can surface and a citation count cannot.
Refereeing and discussant work leave a visible trail: a discussant report that found the real weakness in an identification strategy, a public replication that overturned or confirmed a published result, a comment that caught a specification search. These sample the same reading skill this community is built to score.
The economics evaluation rubric, first draft
Economics evaluation weighs how a causal claim is identified as much as whether the coefficient is significant; the field's credibility revolution is this rubric's spine.
- Identification strategy
- The design isolates the causal claim it makes, and the assumptions it depends on — instrument relevance, parallel trends, running-variable continuity — are argued, not asserted.
- Robustness discipline
- Results hold across reasonable specification choices, and alternative specifications that weaken the finding are reported rather than left out.
- Data and code transparency
- The empirical pipeline can be rerun end to end, sample construction is documented, and results reproduce from what is released.
- External validity honesty
- Claims state the population and setting they cover, and extrapolation beyond that setting is argued explicitly rather than implied by the framing.
Founding economics evaluators will pressure-test this draft first — including against their own past work.
What founding economics evaluators will do
First, take this rubric apart: where it rewards technical sophistication over real identification, where it punishes honest exploratory work, where a dimension cannot actually be scored from a real artifact.
Then run calibration rounds on public working papers and policy analyses, scoring independently and comparing spreads, so the first scores this platform ever publishes come with a known uncertainty rather than false precision.
As the community opens, those calibration records will seed the weighting system: the first economists whose evaluation history is itself part of the instrument.
Who this is for
The founding cohort is looking for economists whose judgment is already in daily use, wherever they happen to practice it:
- Applied microeconomists and econometricians whose identification strategy is their real craft.
- Economists at central banks, policy shops, and tech companies whose best work lives in internal memos.
- Discussants and referees who catch a weak instrument or a specification search on first read.
- Graduate students and postdocs whose empirical rigor outruns their publication count.
Who this is not for
Self-selection matters more than any filter we could write, so here is the honest version:
- Anyone after a quick credential — the founding stage produces standards, not badges.
- Researchers looking to promote their own findings; evaluation here is of other people's artifacts, under a published rubric.
- Anyone uncomfortable having their evaluation accuracy tracked — the calibration record is the point of the design.
- Anyone who needs a live scoring platform today; the mechanics on this page are in design, and the tense is deliberate.
Apply to evaluate economics
Economics is pre-selected on the application. Link an SSRN or NBER listing, ORCID profile, or repository we can read.