Doing Economics

7.2 Undergraduate Research
When it comes to advising undergraduate students as researchers, what and
how much you can expect from your students will largely depend on the
type of institution you find yourself working for. When I talk to colleagues
at a SLAC, I am always amazed at what they can reasonably expect their
undergraduate students to do in terms of research. In an interview for this
book, a colleague who teaches at a SLAC and who also taught at a state
flagship university before that admitted:
Students at SLACs have a much better handle on economic theory and
econometrics than students at other institutions. Students at my
institution have taken really intense micro theory and econometrics. In
my [field] class, I teach stuff from the same [field] class I took during
my PhD program! We go over papers, and while we skip the really
hard stuff, my students still read the landmark papers.
Another colleague who teaches at a SLAC adds:
I assign the same papers I read for my own research to my students
[because] our students take calculus before taking microeconomic and
macroeconomic theory, so they learn optimization. They also take
statistics before econometrics so they are ready to jump into . . .
multivariate regression. Then, they can take [field courses] in which
they use those coding skills to do more empirical research. [B]y the
time they are a senior, they have coding skills and writing skills . . . so
they are ready to write a good thesis.
Another SLAC colleague said:

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Students at SLACs are really creative in the questions they ask, and
they are not yet bogged down by what is feasible or not. They come in
having good questions that you only have to help them hone. They are
also really good at coding, and they know how to critique each other’s
work.
What motivates undergraduates to do research? My coauthor Seth Gitter,
who has written a formal guide to help both faculty and students navigate
the undergraduate research process (Gitter 2021), told me:
Fewer than half of students interested in undergraduate research are
grad school-bound. Most think they might eventually go to grad
school. Most students are thinking about doing a master’s at some
point, however. The best students are the ones who have outside
interests; I advise a lot of dual economics–political science majors.
Those are the most interesting: people who want to do a deep dive into
a given topic instead of a given discipline.
The right advising can be transformational, and cause undergraduates to
develop a passion for the discipline and end up being superstars in their
own right. In an interview for Bowmaker’s (2012) book The Art and
Practice of Economics Research, Susan Athey said
When I discovered economics, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity
to apply abstract ideas and mathematical techniques to something
really important. And I was exposed early on to a policy problem
through a summer job. My mentor . . . showed me how to take a real-
world problem about procurement auctions . . . and translate it into a
possibility to change policy in a way that would make procurement
more efficient . . . [he] made a big effort to pick up promising
undergraduates. He got me a full-time research assistant job with
summer funding and a little office. He was really influential in getting
me into economics, which I had never considered.
Whenever an undergraduate student shows up at your door wanting to do
research, it is your job to establish early on in your relationship with them

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(i) what they know and what they do not know, (ii) how much time they
have until they have to submit a thesis in order to graduate, in order to
know (iii) what they need to learn and what you can reasonably expect from
their research. Once again, the guide by Gitter (2021) provides a clear
roadmap to navigating undergraduate-led research in economics, and should
be required reading for faculty interested in advising undergraduate
researchers as well as for undergraduate researchers themselves.