Jde Literature Positioning

---
name: jde-literature-positioning
description: Use when staking a manuscript's contribution against the development-economics literature for the Journal of Development Economics (JDE). Positions the paper at the frontier; it does not write a standalone survey.
---

# Literature Positioning (jde-literature-positioning)

## When to trigger

- A reviewer would ask "what is new here relative to the development literature?"
- The introduction reads like a survey instead of staking a claim
- You cannot name the two or three papers you are directly building on or beating
- You are unsure whether a result is incremental or a genuine advance for the field

## The JDE positioning bar

JDE referees are specialists in development economics; they judge the **contribution first**. Positioning has to be precise about the field's frontier, not a general-economics frame. Three moves:

1. **Locate the conversation.** Name the specific development literature you join — e.g., the microeconomics of poverty traps, randomized evaluation of education or health interventions, agricultural technology adoption, credit and microfinance, migration, trade and firms in LMICs, political economy of development, or development macro and growth.
2. **Stake the gap precisely.** Say what is known, what the binding open question is, and why prior work could not answer it (data, identification, setting, or theory). Generic "little is known" framing fails here.
3. **Claim the increment.** State what your paper establishes that the named frontier papers do not — a new causal estimate in a first-order setting, a new mechanism, novel hard-to-assemble data, or a theoretical result with development implications.

Because development is a large, active field, cite both the canonical anchors and the **recent frontier** (working papers and the last few years), and be honest about closely competing work — referees will know it.

## Positioning tactics

- Tie the contribution to **policy or welfare** for poor populations, not only to an academic gap.
- If you use a familiar method (an RCT, a DID), the novelty must be in the **question, setting, or mechanism**, not the tool.
- Distinguish your **LATE / population** from neighboring studies: development results are often local, so positioning includes what your estimate adds to the broader evidence base.
- A short references-light positioning paragraph beats a three-page survey.

## Anti-patterns

- A literature section that surveys the field but never stakes a claim
- Ignoring a near-identical recent working paper a referee will surely cite
- Positioning against general economics when the real contest is within a development subliterature
- Claiming "first to study X in country Y" as if novelty of setting alone were a contribution

## Output format

```
【Conversation joined】development subliterature
【Frontier papers】[2-4 anchors, incl. recent]
【Binding gap】one sentence
【Our increment】what we add the frontier lacks
【Next step】jde-contribution-framing
```