About

This course is intended to be a practical guide for early career economists doing applied research. The nuts and bolts of coming up with viable research topics, writing, publishing, and service to the profession are covered in two half-day sessions, each lasting roughly four hours (including short breaks). We begin by providing tips on selecting a research topic, doing a comprehensive literature search, and “pitching” your results. Next, we go through the publication process from choosing a journal to effectively responding to the comments of editors and reviewers. We wrap up by discussing networking, refereeing for economics journals, and getting the most out of conferences and departmental seminars. Each half-day session ends with an optional 30-minute Q&A about the academic job market.

Schedule

Feb. 28, 2025 (9am to 1pm)

Section 1. Starting Your Research Project

1. What makes a research question viable?

   • The three hurdles:

     (i) Is it interesting/important/policy relevant? How do you figure this out?

     (ii) Are you filling a clearly defined gap in the literature? How do you know?

     (iii) Are the data available?

2. When to cut the cord

   • When to give up on a project and when to pivot

   • How long to spend on a project before calling it quits

   • Zero is a number too (but not an uninteresting zero or a noisy zero!)

3. Managing your research projects

   • Allocating effort across multiple projects

   • When to target a non-economics journal (e.g., a medical journal)

   • Targeting journals early in the research process

Section 2. Practical Tips for Writing Your Applied Paper

1. Structure, length, tone, and grammar

   • Rules of thumb when writing your paper

     • Examples of papers that get it right*

     • Examples of papers that didn't*

2. Writing the first half of your paper

   • The introduction

     • How many contributions are you making? How many is too many?

     • Describe the data, identification strategy, and results in the introduction. You are not writing a mystery novel!

   • Background section

     • What goes in background section?*

     • Include institutional details that are relevant to identification?*

     • Should background section include a literature review?*

     • Is the literature review separate from the background section?*

     • Which studies should I give the most weight to?*

   • Data and empirical methods

     • Two separate sections or just one?*

     • Describing your data*

     • Some authors describe their empirical methods before the data section. Is this a good idea?

3. Be careful when collecting and cleaning your data

   • A cautionary tale from Cutler and Miller (2005) vs. Anderson et al. (2022)

4. Writing tips

   • What makes a good table?

     • Examples of good tables

   • Examples of tables that need some work...

   • Useful phrases when writing up results

   • Statistical significance and magnitude

5.  How to write an effective conclusion 

• Do you repeat yourself? How much?

• What goes in the conclusion?

• The ever-important last paragraph

Section 3. Presenting your research

1. How to give a better seminar

   • Less is more

   • The power of stories

   • More table tips

   • Figures are better than tables

     • Prime your audience for the next slide/figure

     • Savior your results

   • Handling questions

Section 4. Open-ended Q&A for remainder of available time

March 1, 2025 (9am to 1pm)

Section 5. The Publication Process

1. Submitting to journals

   • Choosing which journals to target

   • Journal rankings

     • Tradeoff between submitting too high and submitting too low

     • Which ranking is correct?

   • Time-to-decision varies across journals

   • Impact Factors (IFs) and why you should care

2. You received referee reports. Now what?

   • Rejection

     • Do you email the editor?

     • Can you appeal the decision?

     • What revisions should you make?

   • Revision request (R&R)

     • Do you email the editor?

     • Point-by-point responses

     • How to respond to positive/negative referee comments

     • The referee is dead wrong. What do you do?

     • What goes into the paper?

     • The letter to the editor

     • How long do you wait before resubmitting?

Section 6. Refereeing

1. The nuts and bolts of being a good referee

   • When to reject a referee request

   • How to structure your referee report

   • Common pitfalls

     • Do not try to impress the editor

     • Is your report too long?

   • How to write a constructive report

     • Negative but constructive

     • Positive and constructive

Section 7. Presenting your event-study estimates

1. Presenting your equations within the body of your manuscript

2. Making event-study figures

3. Decisions one needs to make when including event-study figures in your paper

Section 8. Conferences and Networking (time permitting and if there interest)

1. Conferences

   • Which conferences should you attend?

   • Organized sessions vs. single-paper submissions

     • Should you organize a session?

     • How to organize a successful session

2. Networking

   • Asking for the data others have collected

   • Your seminar series

Section 9. Q&A for remainder of available time

1. We'll field questions on topics such as:

   • How do you pitch your JMP in 5-10 minutes?

   • Which of your papers is your JMP?

   • What are hiring committees looking for?

2. Ask the editor!

   Mark is on the editorial board at the American Journal of Health Economics and was a coeditor at Economic Inquiry. Dan Rees is a coeditor at the American Journal of Health Economics and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. We would like to wrap up the workshop by fielding questions about our experiences as editors.