Doing Economics

2
Writing Papers
A good film makes you forget that you are watching a film. Similarly, a
good research paper makes you forget that you are reading a research paper.
The authors tell you a story. They take you on a tour of what they have
done: what they have asked themselves, how they have answered it, how
they have made sure their answer was robust, and what, if anything, we can
learn from their results for policy or for business.
But just as a good film immerses you in the world it creates and makes
you forget the various tropes and techniques used in the making of it, a
good research paper is one that makes you forget to notice its overall
structure as well as the various rhetorical devices employed by the authors.
How do you write a good research paper? In my experience, most
research economists have spent too little time thinking about that question,
and even the most successful economists would have a hard time
articulating a clear answer to the same question.
This state of affairs is due both to what economists read, and to how they
read it.
Regarding what economists read, the syllabus for most graduate field
courses usually consists of a “best of” for each topic covered—those papers
that have shaped how people working in the field think and what they know
about that topic. For instance, the syllabus for a graduate development
economics course will almost surely include Foster and Rosenzweig (1995)
and Suri (2011) in its reading list under the topic of technology adoption. In
that literature, those two articles are widely understood to be among the
most important.
This applies mainly to more junior readers—the more senior one gets, the
more one has been exposed to bad papers by virtue of having reviewed
more papers—but reading only the best papers is a double-edged sword. To
be sure, those are the papers we learn the most from when it comes to how
our peers think about a given topic. At the same time, those papers tend to

---

be the most polished ones—those nearest to perfection—on a given topic.
But it is difficult for one to learn what makes a paper good if all one ever
reads is perfect papers. To carry the film analogy further, if all you ever
watch are those films on the British Film Institute’s list of the 50 greatest
films of all time, and you never watch any bad (or even average) movies, it
will be difficult for you to discover what actually makes those top-50 films
any good.
Regarding how economists read, the syllabi of most graduate field
courses often lists so many articles as to cause graduate students to quickly
develop a skill Mortimer Adler referred to in his classic How to Read a
Book as inspectional reading (Adler and Van Doren 2014). When reading
academic papers, inspectional reading involves reading the introduction,
looking at the methods and results, and (maybe) reading the conclusion
before moving on to the next item on one’s reading list. Reading papers that
way is a good way to develop one’s knowledge of the literature on a given
topic, but it is hardly a recipe for learning how to write good papers.
1
The goal of this chapter is thus to help readers write applied papers for
eventual submission and publication in peer-reviewed journals. To do so,
the various components of a research paper are discussed in as much detail
as possible, roughly in the order in which they are tackled in the context of
a research project.