Research Ideation

Generate structured research questions, testable hypotheses, and empirical strategies from a topic, phenomenon, or dataset.

Input: $ARGUMENTS, a topic (e.g., "minimum wage effects on employment"), a phenomenon (e.g., "why do firms cluster geographically?"), or a dataset description (e.g., "panel of US counties with pollution and health outcomes, 2000-2020").

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Steps

1. Understand the input. Read $ARGUMENTS and any referenced files. Check master_supporting_docs/ for related papers. Check .claude/rules/ for domain conventions.

2. Generate 3-5 research questions ordered from descriptive to causal:

   • Descriptive: What are the patterns? (e.g., "How has X evolved over time?")
   • Correlational: What factors are associated? (e.g., "Is X correlated with Y after controlling for Z?")
   • Causal: What is the effect? (e.g., "What is the causal effect of X on Y?")
   • Mechanism: Why does the effect exist? (e.g., "Through what channel does X affect Y?")
   • Policy: What are the implications? (e.g., "Would policy X improve outcome Y?")

3. Tag each RQ with a likely paper type (drawn from methods-referee.md):

   • reduced-form (DiD, IV, RD, event study, synthetic control)
   • structural (estimation of a fully-specified model)
   • theory+empirics (formal model + empirical test of its predictions)
   • descriptive (measurement, data construction, pattern documentation)
   • formal-theory (pure theory, no empirical test in this paper)
   • survey-experiment (vignette, conjoint, list-experiment)
   • unsure (when multiple types are plausible, the user can pick later via /interview-me)

   Use .claude/references/discipline-cards.md to bias the distribution by field (econ vs poli-sci default frequencies differ, e.g., poli-sci skews more toward survey-experiment and formal-theory than econ does).