Jie Literature Positioning

---
name: jie-literature-positioning
description: Use to position a Journal of International Economics (JIE) manuscript against the international-trade or open-economy-macro frontier — staking the contribution against gravity/structural-trade or international-finance literatures without writing a standalone survey. Sharpens positioning; it does not draft the paper.
---

# Literature Positioning (jie-literature-positioning)

## When to trigger

- The contribution is not yet stated sharply against the existing international-economics literature
- A reviewer might say "this is already known" or "wrong comparison set"
- You are writing a literature section that reads like a survey instead of a claim

## How to position at JIE

JIE is a field journal, so positioning happens **within international economics**, against the right sub-literature — not against all of economics. Pin the paper to its frontier and state, in one or two sentences, what you add. Choose the comparison set deliberately:

- **Trade**: gravity and structural gravity (Anderson–van Wincoop, Head–Mayer; PPML à la Santos Silva–Tenreyro), Eaton–Kortum / Melitz quantitative trade, commercial-policy and trade-agreement work (Staiger and co-authors), the China-shock / shift-share exposure literature, GVCs and trade in value added, spatial/economic-geography.
- **International macro/finance**: open-economy macro and the small-open-economy/RBC-NK tradition (Uribe and co-authors), exchange-rate disconnect and pass-through (Engel and co-authors), sovereign default (Eaton–Gersovitz, Arellano), capital flows and the global financial cycle, international pricing and currency of invoicing.

State the contribution as a **delta**: "Relative to [frontier paper(s)], we [new data / new mechanism / new identification], which changes [quantitative or qualitative conclusion]." Cite the editors' and the field's anchor papers where genuinely relevant — but do not pad.

## What referees check

- Are the closest two or three papers cited and correctly distinguished?
- Is the claimed gap real, or already filled in a paper you missed?
- Does the positioning match your scope half (trade vs macro-finance)?
- Is the contribution original in **motivation or modelling structure**, per JIE's gate, and is that originality legible here?

## Anti-patterns

- A chronological survey instead of a staked claim
- Positioning a trade paper only against macro work, or vice versa
- Comparing to a broad genre ("the gravity literature") instead of the closest papers
- Over-claiming a gap that a recent JIE/AER/JIE-adjacent paper already closed
- Ignoring the handling-editor's own frontier when it is the obvious comparison

## Output format

```
【Scope half】trade / macro-finance
【Frontier (closest 2-3)】[paper → what it did]
【Your delta】new data / new mechanism / new identification → changed conclusion
【Originality framing】motivation or modelling structure
【Gap defended against】[recent papers that might pre-empt you]
【Next step】jie-identification-strategy
```

## Supplementary resources

- [`../../resources/external_tools.md`](../../resources/external_tools.md) — data and tools that often define a contribution's novelty
- [`../../resources/official-source-map.md`](../../resources/official-source-map.md) — editor roster (to identify frontier anchors)