Red Literature Positioning

---
name: red-literature-positioning
description: Use to position a Review of Economic Dynamics (RED) manuscript within the dynamic-economics and SED literature — mapping the quantitative-macro lineage a paper builds on, citing in author-year style, and making the marginal advance legible to the Society for Economic Dynamics readership rather than a generalist audience.
---

# Literature Positioning for RED (red-literature-positioning)

## When to trigger

- Writing the introduction and related-work sections for a RED submission
- Unsure which strand of the dynamic-economics literature the paper extends
- Pitching the contribution to the SED community versus a generalist top-5 framing

## How to position for RED

RED's readers are the **SED community** working on dynamic models. Position the paper inside the
**method lineage**, not just the topic:

- Name the **modeling tradition** you extend (e.g., RBC/DSGE, Aiyagari/Bewley–Huggett heterogeneous
  agents, Krusell–Smith aggregate-uncertainty methods, search/matching, endogenous growth, HANK).
- State the **quantitative gap** precisely: which moment the prior models miss, which mechanism is
  absent, which policy environment is unmodeled, or which computational barrier you remove.
- Distinguish your **contribution type** — a new mechanism, a new solution/estimation method, a new
  quantitative finding, or a new empirical regularity that disciplines the model.
- Use **author-year (Harvard-style)** citations throughout, consistent with RED's reference system.

Because RED's scope is method-defined, the literature you cite should be **dynamic-model** literature.
A paper that mostly cites reduced-form empirical work without a dynamic-modeling anchor reads as a
poor fit; tie empirical references back to what they discipline in the model.

## Checklist

- [ ] The modeling lineage is named and the paper's place in it is explicit
- [ ] The marginal advance is stated as a quantitative/mechanistic delta, not "we also study X"
- [ ] Closely related SED-community papers are cited and differentiated, not ignored
- [ ] Citations are clean author-year; reference list complete and consistent

## Anti-patterns

- A generalist "big literature" sweep that never locates the paper in a dynamic-model tradition
- Burying the closest competitor instead of confronting it head-on
- Mixed or inconsistent citation styles instead of clean author-year

## Supplementary resources

- [`../../resources/official-source-map.md`](../../resources/official-source-map.md) — author-year style and scope sources