Doing Economics

3.4 Online and Hybrid Talks
As a result of the pandemic, much of the professional life of economists has
moved online.
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For better or for worse, this includes seminar and
conference presentations, which can now be entirely online or hybrid, with

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some people tuning in online and others congregating in person, either in
the same room as the presenter or somewhere else.
While it can be nice to give a research talk from the comfort of your own
home, giving online talks involves its fair share of problems, depending on
the format.
The ideal format is one where you only have to focus on giving your talk,
and a moderator is in charge of monitoring the chat for questions and
interrupting you at opportune times to allow specific audience members to
ask questions. A less ideal format, at least for audiences larger than about
20 attendees, is one where audience members un-mute themselves when
they feel like asking a question.
At a minimum, you should arrange with the seminar or conference
organizers to log on five to ten minutes early to make sure that the
technology being used works and that you are familiar with it. Another
thing to keep in mind is that because our professional lives have moved
online, we all spend more than enough time online, and so no one will ever
fault you for using less than your allotted time. In fact, because participants
tend to ask fewer questions during online seminars, you should make a
point of finishing early. With that said, the format of an online talk should
be the same as for an equivalent in-person talk.
3.5 Other Talk Formats
Invited seminars and conference talks are the two most common formats for
a research talk, but there are other talk formats. This section discusses what
to keep in mind when preparing a lightning talk or a poster presentation.
Lightning Talks. If preparing a conference talk from an invited seminar
presentation involves trimming some of the fat off of your longer talk so as
to make it presentable in 15 or 20 minutes, preparing a lightning talk
involves making deep cuts to your conference talk so as to make it
presentable in three to five minutes. Something to keep in mind for
lightning talks is this: If you had 5 minutes entirely to yourself to sell a
research paper to someone, what would you focus on? And perhaps more
importantly, what would you leave out? This means you should focus on
answering a single research question even if your paper answers two or

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three, and only provide information that is strictly necessary to understand
how you answer that research question and what you find. Put differently,
this means turning your one- or two-page structured abstract into a
presentation. That presentation should have one slide each for your title,
motivations and research question, data, empirical framework, and results,
for a total of about five slides. Here, one should avoid the temptation to
cram as much information as possible on each slide. A good commitment
device for this is to not let your presentation software adjust your font size
downward as you include more and more information on a slide.
Poster Presentations. I must confess to having never prepared a poster
for presentation at a conference. Although posters are common in other
disciplines, where papers are not quality-differentiated by whether they are
accepted as presentations or posters, in economics posters are often for
papers that are a step down from presentations in terms of quality. Here, the
best strategy seems to be to prepare a poster that tells someone who reads it
what they need to know about your research question, methods, and
findings if they only read it without you being there to explain anything, to
use a vertical template that has two columns, and to break each column into
three or four “slides.” The major advantage of a poster presentation is that
you can include much more text on each slide than you would for a
conference presentation, and so your poster can include some of the details
you would relegate to your appendix slides when giving a conference
presentation. But because a poster presentation is inherently more visual, it
helps to tell your story in pictures, if possible, and to include figures to
make points that you would otherwise make verbally (when presenting at an
invited seminar or a conference) or in writing (in the paper). For instance,
while a flowchart would never be deemed acceptable as a theoretical model
in a paper, a flowchart can help convey your theory of change quite well on
a poster.