Doing Economics

3.3 Conference Presentations
Whether you have previously presented a paper as an invited seminar or are
presenting it for the first time at a conference, preparing a presentation for a
conference is not much more difficult than preparing it for an invited
seminar.
The main difficulty here is to ensure that you prepare just the right
amount of material. Indeed, although conference presentations tend to be
much shorter (i.e., 10 to 20 minutes) than invited seminars, it is not
uncommon for busy academics to show up at conferences and present using
the same deck of slides they would use for an invited seminar—only three
to four times faster. Here, it behooves the presenter to put himself in his
audience’s shoes, and to understand that few people, if any, enjoy listening
to relatively complex presentations at triple or quadruple speed.
Obviously, the key lies in determining which parts of the longer, invited-
seminar version of the presentation can go. The advantage of presenting a
paper at a conference is that the audience for a conference talk tends to be

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more selected than the audience for an invited seminar. In the former case,
the conference is often dedicated to a specific field (e.g., the annual
conference of the Society of Labor Economists or the various NBER
Summer Institutes), whereas in the latter case, the audience is much more
heterogeneous, especially in departments where there is a strong social
norm about attending seminars. This means that a lot of material meant to
convince a general audience of research economists that your work looks at
an interesting research question and educate them about how things are
done in your field need not be made explicit for a conference. Even for
general conferences, such as the annual meetings of the American
Economic Association (AEA) or the annual congress of the European
Economic Association, the audience for a specific session will tend to have
selected into attending your talk and thus require considerably less
handholding than at an invited seminar.
In the case of a conference presentation, the one-slide-per-minute rule is
useful, so if your talk is to last 15 minutes, aim for 15 slides, and aim for 20
slides if you are given 20 minutes. If you go over your allotted time when
giving a seminar, it only impacts you, and audience members who need to
leave can always leave before you are finished. If you do the same at a
conference, however, you have directly taken time away from the other
speakers.
It is thus crucial to figure out how much time you will have to present
before you sit down to make your slides. Here is how you should go about
making conference slides:
1. Title. No difference from the title slide for an invited seminar.
2. Introduction. For a selected audience, your hook is not as
important, and you can often state the research question right
away since the audience will immediately understand why it
matters. You can also keep the antecedents—the mini literature
review—rather short, because once again, your audience is likely
to be familiar with the literature.
3. Theoretical Framework. Again, Thomson (2011) discusses how
to give talks about theory papers. When presenting an empirical
paper, a brief (i.e., one-, at most two-slide) presentation of your
primitives, variables, assumptions, and of the optimization

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problem before presenting the main predictions to be tested is
fine.
4. Empirical Framework. A brief (i.e., ideally one-slide)
presentation of your estimable equations(s) and definitions of the
included variables, and a two- to three-slide discussion of your
identification strategy. Though you may ideally need 15 minutes
in an invited seminar to render justice to your identification
strategy and discuss its subtleties, it is best to focus on the strict
minimum here, and to leave further discussion for after your talk.
5. Data and Descriptive Statistics. In the ideal case, the data you use
will be so well known to your audience (e.g., the Panel Study of
Income Dynamics) that you will not have to dwell on your data
sources other than to mention which rounds or waves of data you
are using. In other cases (e.g., when presenting a paper relying on
primary data) you will have to go into more detail. Here, too,
brevity is the soul of wit, and your audience only needs the
necessary information. Although you may be justifiably proud of
(and have unforgettable memories from) having spent a
significant fraction of your life in sub-Saharan Africa overseeing
an RCT in difficult conditions, this is not the time to go into
needless details. You should have slides of descriptive statistics
and balance tests, but those should be skipped unless there is
something crucial in them (e.g., randomization was not done
correctly and the balance is off on more covariates than one
should be comfortable with), and are thus only included for the
curious who want to see them after the talk.
6. Results and Discussion. You have obviously worked hard to
estimate all of the relevant specifications and to conduct all of the
robustness checks one could possibly want to see, so it may be
tempting to show all of those tables. Please refrain from doing so
for a conference talk, and show two to three tables of core results
(whatever that means in the context of your paper), and then show
a slide with a list of short bullet points explaining what your
results are robust to (e.g., “Results are robust to: linear trends
instead of time fixed effects; quadratic trends instead of time
fixed effects; region-year fixed effects; . . .”)

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7. Summary and Concluding Remarks. This is idiosyncratic, but my
view is that conference presentations are short enough that this
section is not necessary, and that this is more true the shorter the
presentation. What I like to do is to prepare a proper two-slide
(i.e., one slide summarizing the research question and findings,
and one slide with implications for policy or business strategy and
directions for future research), but to say something like “In the
interest of time and of letting you ask your questions, I’ll just skip
this.” If you prefer to go through a proper conclusion, there is no
harm to doing so, but realize that it is directly taken out of your
allotted time.
8. Appendix. If appendix slides are your secret weapon when
presenting at an invited seminar, they can be even more so when
presenting at a conference. All of the material that had to be taken
out of the long-form, invited-seminar version of your presentation
can (and should probably) be put in your appendix so that you
may refer to it when audience members ask you to go into more
depth about specific parts of your presentation.
There is one crucial distinction between an invited seminar presentation
and a conference presentation: whereas an invited seminar is a primarily an
occasion for you to engage in a dialogue with your audience and only
secondarily an occasion to add something to your CV, the short clock on a
conference presentation means that there is much less dialogue, and that
such talks are more of an occasion to market your work and add a line to
your CV, with the bulk of the dialogue taking place between sessions over
coffee and during meals than for an invited seminar. So while you may
expect your audience to make game-changing comments about your work
at a conference, if and when you get such comments, you are more likely to
get them after your session is over than during your allotted time. For early-
career researchers, knowing this can be quite liberating.