Doing Economics

3.9 How to Answer and Manage Audience
Questions
Your first reaction may be to think “I don’t need a book to teach me how to
answer questions; I know how to do that.” And in all likelihood, you have a
good idea how to do it. But I have seen enough bad answers to audience
questions by speakers at seminars and conferences that I thought this
deserved its own section.

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First off, you should always have a pen and some paper to note down
your audience’s questions and comments, both because it can be difficult to
remember multi-part questions and because you may want to refer to those
questions and comments when you update your work. And indeed, a
speaker who is not noting down his audience’s questions and comments at
best looks like he is only there to add a line to his CV, and at worst come
across as though he does not think any interesting question or comment will
formulated by the members of this specific audience. Either way, it is not a
good look.
Second, it should go without saying that whatever you do, you should
remain respectful of your audience. You may be asked a question that you
think is stupid, but the questioner may simply not have expressed herself
clearly, or you may not have understood her question. In both cases, it helps
to restate the question in your own words, and give the questioner a chance
to either agree with your restatement or reformulate the question.
One thing which I have seen annoy audiences is some speakers’ tendency
to begin answering questions before those questions are finished and thus to
speak over the questioner. You may have given your talk 20 times and be
able to anticipate exactly where a question is going, but resist the
temptation to start answer the question before it is over, both because no
one likes getting interrupted, and because your questioner might decide to
add on a second question at the end of that first one.
Third, a good thing to keep in mind when answering questions at
seminars and conferences is that economics (and science in general) is a
collective enterprise, and so this is meant to be a conversation. The seminar
culture in economics tends to be more blunt (but not necessarily more
adversarial) than in other disciplines, but only in rare cases are questions
asked out of malice (though they certainly often arise out of a desire on the