Doing Economics

2.6 Summary and Concluding Remarks
Many economics papers title their conclusion “Summary and Concluding
Remarks,” which is a pretty good indication of how a conclusion should
proceed. What I learned in high school was that a good conclusion should
have two main parts: (i) a summary of what you have spent the several
pages before the conclusion doing, and (ii) the way forward.
The following guidelines should help cut down on the transaction costs
one faces when writing a conclusion by providing a roadmap. Strictly
speaking, a conclusion should be structured as follows:
• Summary. You have surely heard that when writing a research
paper, “tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em, tell ’em what you
want to tell ’em, and tell ’em what you just told ’em.” Writing
this part of a conclusion is tedious—you have just spent 40 or
more pages telling them—but it needs to be there, and it needs to
be different enough from the abstract and the introduction. This
does not mean this part must say something new; it just needs to
be different enough. If possible, tell a story—a story about the
paper’s contribution, and the gap it fills.
• Limitations. Some people like to have a “Limitations” section at
the end of their results section; I like to have that myself, as
discussed above. But even then, the conclusion should
(re-)emphasize the limitations of your approach.
• Real-World Implications. Presumably, your work has some sort of
implication for policy, business strategy, or something else in the
real world. This will not always be the case—some papers make a
purely technical point, or a point that is only ancillary when it
comes to making other policy-related points. Discuss what those

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implications are. Do not make claims that are not supported by
your results. Try to assess the cost of what you propose in
comparison to its benefits. You can do so somewhat imperfectly
(this is probably where the phrase “back-of-the-envelope
calculation” most often comes up in economics papers), since the
point of your work was presumably about only one side of that
equation—usually the benefits of something, sometimes its costs,
but rarely both. In two or three sentences, identify the clear
winners and losers of what your results suggest. Also discuss how
easy or hard it would be to implement.
• Implications for Future Research. No work is perfect. Your
theoretical contribution could be generalized or broadened by
relaxing certain assumptions. Your empirical contribution could
probably benefit from better causal identification for better
internal validity. Even with an RCT with perfect compliance and
a perfect average treatment effect estimate, you are likely to have
some treatment heterogeneity that is not accounted for, or you
might want to run the same RCT in additional locations for
external validity. If you are writing a follow-up paper, this is a
good place to set the stage for it.