Economics and social science: regression tables that journals accept

Empirical social science lives and dies by tables. A wrong decimal alignment or a missing significance star wastes a revise-and-resubmit cycle that had nothing to do with the identification strategy.

booktabs is not optional

Vertical rules and double horizontal lines read as 1990s Word. Use:

\usepackage{booktabs}
\toprule ... \midrule ... \bottomrule

See three-rule tables. Export from R (modelsummary, stargazer) or Stata to LaTeX fragments, then clean the header row by hand.

Notes under the table

threeparttable keeps the caption, tabular, and tablenotes the same width. Put sample size, fixed effects, and clustered standard-error notes there, not in a footnote attached to a random cell.

Numeric columns

siunitx column types (S) align on the decimal point. That alone makes a results table look intentional. Watch for stars: significance markers often need a custom column or a text wrap so 0.012^{***} still aligns.

Citations: author-year is the default dialect

Most econ and poli-sci venues expect author-year. biblatex with style=authoryear or a journal style is easier long-term than fighting .bst files. If the lab still uses natbib, that is fine: just do not mix both stacks in one preamble. Overview: BibTeX or biblatex.

Working papers and SSRN

Working-paper versions change monthly. Keep the title page date in a macro (\def\paperdate{June 2026}) and bump it when you re-export the PDF. Local Git history is more honest than “final_final_v7.pdf” on a shared drive.