| name | jue-topic-selection |
| description | Use when deciding whether a question is a genuinely spatial, urban-economics contribution that fits the Journal of Urban Economics (JUE) rather than a sibling venue. Locks the spatial question and outlet fit before positioning; it does not write the literature review or design the identification. |
Topic Selection (jue-topic-selection)
When to trigger
- The question is interesting but it is unclear it is spatial — could it be a labor or public-finance paper that merely uses geographic data?
- The paper sits on a boundary with RSUE, Journal of Regional Science, JEG (OUP), or JPubE and you must decide where it belongs
- A reviewer or coauthor asks "why is this urban economics?" and the answer is thin
- You have a clean result but no urban mechanism — only a geographic correlation
- You are choosing between a full JUE article and the short-paper JUE: Insights track
Is this a JUE paper? The spatial-mechanism test
JUE publishes work where space is constitutive of the economics, not a label on the data. The question should turn on at least one spatial primitive: agglomeration economies, housing supply elasticity, land use & zoning, commuting/transportation, local public finance & Tiebout sorting, neighborhood effects, or spatial sorting/equilibrium. Run the manuscript through three gates:
- Mechanism gate. Can you name a spatial mechanism — capitalization, agglomeration spillover, sorting across locations, congestion, market access — that generates the result? If the mechanism is a-spatial (it would hold with units relabeled non-geographically), it is not a JUE paper.
- Equilibrium gate. Does the question respect that people and firms move? A partial result that ignores spatial reallocation (workers/firms/residents re-sorting) will draw the JUE referee's first objection. The contribution should engage spatial equilibrium even if reduced-form.
- Marginal-contribution gate. Urban economics is mature; "X affects house prices / city size / wages" is rarely enough. The novelty must be a new mechanism, a new spatial design, novel geocoded data, or a quantitatively important magnitude for urban policy.
Sibling-boundary decision table
| If the paper's core is... | It belongs at... | because... |
|---|
| a spatial mechanism with urban data and an urban audience | JUE | the field flagship for urban & regional economics |
| methods/theory of regional science, broader spatial econometrics | RSUE or J. of Regional Science | JUE leads with the economics, not the spatial method per se |
| economic-geography framing, clusters, evolutionary geography | JEG (OUP) | JEG is geography-leaning and non-Elsevier |
| the tax/spending design dominates; geography is the setting | JPubE | a place-based result is not automatically a public-finance contribution |
| a broad applied-micro causal result with a city setting | AEJ: Applied | AEJ rewards the design; JUE wants the spatial mechanism too |
Choosing the article format
- Full JUE article — a complete contribution: design, mechanism, magnitudes, robustness, policy reading.
- JUE: Insights — a focused, well-identified short result. Cap ≤6,000 words and ≤5 exhibits (each exhibit below five buys +200 words; a zero-exhibit paper ≤7,000 words) (检索于 2026-06；以官网为准). Use it for a single sharp finding (a clean policy evaluation, a measurement contribution) that does not need a full model. The track was launched to publish timely, tightly-identified short papers; do not pad a Insights-sized result into a full article to look weightier.
What gets desk-rejected at JUE
JUE is a high-volume field flagship and the editors desk-reject freely. The recurring desk-reject patterns are worth designing against from the start:
- No spatial mechanism — a result that uses geographic units but whose economics is a-spatial (a labor or finance result that happens to be measured by city).
- Setting mistaken for contribution — "the first study of [city/country]" with no new mechanism, design, data, or magnitude.
- Wrong venue — a tax-design paper (JPubE), a spatial-method paper (RSUE), or an economic-geography paper (JEG) sent to JUE because it is "about cities."
- Identification not credible for space — a cross-location OLS that any urban referee will read as sorting, presented as causal.
- Stale question with no new angle — re-confirming a well-established urban regularity without moving the frontier.
Timeliness and the JUE: Insights niche
The Insights track was built for results that are sharp and timely — a clean evaluation of a recent policy, a measurement contribution, a decisive null. If your finding is one well-identified estimate that does not need a model and would lose force if delayed by a multi-year full-article cycle, Insights is the right home. Reserve the full article for contributions that need a model, a battery of mechanisms, or a quantitative-spatial counterfactual. Misjudging this — padding an Insights result or compressing a full contribution — is itself a fit error referees notice.
Worked vignette (illustrative)
A team has clean admin data showing firms near a new university campus pay higher wages. Tempting framing: "agglomeration raises wages." But the mechanism gate exposes a sorting story — high-wage firms may have located near the campus. The JUE-viable reframing pins a mechanism: use the staggered campus openings as a shock to local knowledge spillovers, decompose the wage gain into sorting vs true spillover, and report the spillover magnitude relevant to place-based innovation policy. That is an agglomeration contribution; "firms near campuses pay more" is a desk-reject.
Checklist
Anti-patterns
- A national/firm-level result run on county or city data with no spatial mechanism ("geographic data ≠ urban economics")
- Ignoring that agents re-sort, so the estimated effect double-counts or omits general-equilibrium reallocation
- Pitching to JUE a paper whose real contribution is a tax design (→ JPubE) or a spatial-econometrics method (→ RSUE)
- Forcing a thin result into a full article when JUE: Insights fits better, or vice versa
- Claiming "first paper to study X city" as if novelty of setting were novelty of contribution
Data-availability shapes feasibility — decide early
Urban questions are often constrained by what geography you can observe. Before committing, confirm the spatial resolution you need actually exists and is accessible: parcel/address-level for capitalization and boundary designs, establishment-level for agglomeration, tract/block for neighborhood effects, network/GTFS for transport. A question that requires geocoded individual data you cannot obtain (or cannot deposit under JUE's replication policy) is a topic-selection problem, not a later logistics detail — fold the data path and the replication route into the topic decision, and loop in jue-replication-package if the data is restricted.
Output format
【Spatial mechanism】one sentence — what space does in the economics
【JUE vs sibling】JUE / RSUE / JRS / JEG / JPubE / AEJ:Applied + one-line reason
【Format】full article / JUE: Insights
【Marginal contribution】mechanism / design / data / magnitude (pick the real one)
【Equilibrium engagement】how reallocation is handled
【Next skill】jue-literature-positioning
If the spatial-mechanism test fails, the fastest fix is rarely a new dataset — it is reframing the existing result around the spatial primitive (capitalization, sorting, agglomeration) that was always implicit but never made the point of the paper.
