Doing Economics

2.7.3 Abstract
Having chosen a good title and having written a good introduction, the task
of writing your abstract should be relatively easy. Typically, it is possible to
write a solid draft of your abstract by keeping only the first sentence of the
hook, research question, and value-added sections of your introduction, and
by polishing up the resulting paragraph some.
A good piece of advice I received from a senior colleague early on in my
career was that except for the requisite terminology (e.g., RCT) difference-
in-differences, regression discontinuity), your abstract should be intelligible
to any smart, college-educated person who is not an economist. This is
especially true for an empirical paper in economics. After all, we are
writing about real-world phenomena that are of interest to policy makers or
business managers, so your abstract should be intelligible to someone with
a master’s degree in public policy or in business administration, depending
on what you are doing. In other words, do not make the mistake of
confusing lack of intelligibility with intellectual rigor; this is economics, not
French postmodern philosophy (Sokal and Bricmont, 1999).
Ultimately, your goal is not only to get your papers published, but to get
them read, and to get them cited. The measure of a scholar’s impact in any
discipline is her number of citations.
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 If your title is not repellent, and if
your abstract is intelligible to people who are not experts in your field and
to people in other disciplines, you have just considerably expanded the
scope of your citations—for better or for worse, a lot of people cite a lot of
articles they have only read the abstract of.

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2.8 Literature Review and Background Sections
You may have noted that Keith Head’s introduction formula includes its
own (mini) literature review. Although master’s theses or doctoral
dissertation chapters should include a separate section reviewing the
literature to signal that the student is clearly familiar with the literature she
is working in, such a section is almost always entirely unwarranted in a
paper to be submitted to an economics journal.
The reason is simple: most readers have only very little time on their
hands, and most readers will want to get to a paper’s contribution sooner
rather than later. As a result, a mini literature review discussing how a given
paper relates to the five to ten closest studies in the literature is much more
effective than a separate section reviewing an entire literature.
Moreover, most people are not good enough writers to pull off writing a
literature review section that is worthy of being read, which requires telling
a compelling story about the development of an idea or method. Though
most researchers know their topic well enough to be able to identify all or
almost all of the relevant related studies, few are able to aggregate the
knowledge derived therefrom and coherently write up the intellectual
history of the topic at hand. In any case, literature reviews are best written
by senior scholars—who are more likely to offer a unique perspective on a
topic because they have thought about it for a long time—and to theses and
dissertation chapters. For the majority of applied economics articles, unless
a reviewer asks for a separate literature review section, a mini literature
review in the introduction is enough.
What about background sections? Those are a different story. When a
topic requires a good amount of background knowledge, a separate
background section can be very useful. This is especially the case when the
details of some legislation need to be kept in mind when assessing the
effects of some part or all of that legislation on some outcome of interest.
Likewise, in empirical industrial organization studies, it is common for
authors to include a background section that describes the industry they are
studying. As with anything else in an economics article, the background
section should tell the reader what she needs to know—no more and no
less.

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