Doing Economics

2.1 Structure
Before producing any kind of work, it helps to know what the typical
structure of such work looks like, and to write down a rough sketch of that
structure. In its most abstract sense, the structure of the typical economics
paper—applied or otherwise—is as follows:
1. Title
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. . . .
5. Summary and Concluding Remarks

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6. References
Depending on the type of paper one writes, the fourth item will change.
Since this chapter is geared toward writing applied papers, the structure
above will typically be modified as follows:
1. Title
2. Abstract
3. Introduction
4. Theoretical Framework
5. Data and Descriptive Statistics
6. Empirical Framework
7. Results and Discussion
8. Summary and Concluding Remarks
9. References
10. Appendix
This structure is not set in stone. A frequent departure from the sequence
above is when items 5 and 6 are switched around so that the Empirical
Framework section comes before the Data and Descriptive Statistics section
—something that is often a matter of taste, if not of expositional clarity.
Similarly, a paper investigating a question that has often been asked (e.g.,
the effect of adopting a minimum-wage policy on unemployment) might not
require a Theoretical Framework section at all because the theory behind
that question is well known and is the stuff of textbooks. Or there might be
a Background section after the Introduction, where important contextual
details are given that fit neither in the Introduction nor in the Descriptive
Statistics section. Some papers might require a major overhaul of that
structure. Even in such cases, it helps to be familiar with the usual structure.
A good analogy in this case is this: before jazz legend John Coltrane ever
thought of recording avant-garde albums like A Love Supreme (1965), he
first learned how to operate within the (much more regimented) structure of
bebop on albums like Blue Train (1957), and before that as a sideman on
albums by Miles Davis.

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What does this mean for an economist? It means that before you break
the rules, you have to learn them. So before thinking of writing a paper
whose structure is barely recognizable to the average reader, an economist
should make sure to have written enough papers that follow the usual
structure laid out above. In other words, freedom from structure tends to be
a privilege granted to more experienced researchers, who have accumulated
enough good will from their readers that they are allowed to bend the rules
a little bit.
The remainder of this chapter will not follow the structure just given.
Though it would certainly be easier for me to write a chapter whose
subsequent headings follow that exact structure in order, it turns out that the
structure in which we present our work in a research paper tends to be very
different from the structure in which we actually do the work.