Jie Contribution Framing

---
name: jie-contribution-framing
description: Use to frame the contribution of a Journal of International Economics (JIE) manuscript so it clears the journal's gate that work be original in its motivation or modelling structure — articulating what is new for international trade or international macro/finance, for an audience split between the two halves of the field. Frames the "what's new"; it does not produce the results.
---

# Contribution Framing (jie-contribution-framing)

## When to trigger

- The results exist but the "so what / what's new" is not crisp
- A referee might say "incremental" or "not original enough"
- You need to state the contribution in JIE's own terms before writing the intro

## JIE's originality gate

JIE accepts both empirical and theoretical work, but it must be **original in its motivation or modelling structure**. This is the exact bar to frame against — not "important" or "policy-relevant" in the abstract, but **new in motivation or new in modelling**. Choose the axis your paper actually delivers on:

- **Motivation originality**: a new international-economics question, a new fact, or new data the field did not have — e.g., a novel tariff/NTM dataset, firm-level customs records, a new measure of capital flows, exchange-rate pass-through, or sovereign-spread dynamics. Frame it as "the field believed/assumed X; with [new data/fact] we show Y."
- **Modelling originality**: a non-trivial new mechanism or structure — e.g., a new ingredient in an Eaton–Kortum/Melitz trade model, a new channel in a small-open-economy DSGE, or a new sovereign-default mechanism. Frame it as "existing models cannot generate Z; our structure does, and it matters quantitatively because [counterfactual]."

## Frame for the right half of the field

JIE's readership is split between trade and international macro/finance. State which half you are addressing and pitch the contribution in that half's currency (a trade elasticity / welfare gain, or a pass-through / cyclicality / default moment). A contribution invisible to your half's referees will read as incremental even if it is not.

## A one-paragraph contribution statement

Write a single paragraph that names: (1) the international-economics question, (2) the originality axis (motivation or modelling), (3) the concrete novelty (data/fact or mechanism), (4) the headline quantitative result, and (5) why it matters for the field. This paragraph should survive almost verbatim into the introduction and align with the ≤150-word abstract.

## Anti-patterns

- Framing on importance/policy relevance instead of motivation/modelling originality
- Claiming both motivation and modelling novelty when the paper delivers neither sharply
- A contribution legible only to the other half of the field
- "First paper to study [country/period]" as the entire novelty
- A framing the results cannot actually support (over-claiming)

## Output format

```
【Question】(one line, international-economics)
【Originality axis】motivation / modelling structure
【Concrete novelty】new data-fact / new mechanism
【Headline result】(quantitative)
【Field half】trade / macro-finance + why it matters there
【One-paragraph statement】(drafted, intro-ready)
【Next step】jie-tables-figures or jie-writing-style
```

## Supplementary resources

- [`../../resources/external_tools.md`](../../resources/external_tools.md) — data and model toolkits that often constitute the novelty
- [`../../resources/official-source-map.md`](../../resources/official-source-map.md) — scope and originality-gate sources