Doing Economics

2.7 Title, Abstract, and Introduction
The title, abstract, and introduction of a paper are, in order, the three most
important marketing tools for any paper. This probably is doubly true for
empirical papers, wherein authors rarely advance the frontier of knowledge
theoretically or methodologically. Indeed, readers are probably more likely
to put up with a bad title, a poorly written abstract, a meandering
introduction—or all three—if they know that a paper will change their
understanding of how the world works, or if they know that it will give
them new tools they can use in their own research. Those same readers are
unlikely to have that kind of patience for empirical papers, which are about
the sign and magnitude of an empirical relationship, and how the authors
estimated that relationship. Consequently, the following subsections focus
on these components of an applied economics paper.

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2.7.1 Title
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes a good title. Much like US
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of hard-core
pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio, when it comes to a good title, “I know it
when I see it.” Colleagues who tend to publish in general-science journals
like Science, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
often insist that we should state our results in our titles. While that may be
true for the papers we submit to those general-science journals, titles
conform to a certain norm in economics which is best followed if you want
your papers to look like they fit in.
To that end, it is perhaps easier to define what makes for a bad title. For
starters, any title which emphasizes the technique you are using is sure to
turn off most readers, unless you develop said technique. Spare your would-
be readers titles—especially subtitles—of the form “A Semiparametric
Investigation” or “Nonparametric Evidence from [Your Context].” Long
titles also tend to make readers not want to read your paper. That is
probably why there is an inverse relationship between the length of a
paper’s title and the number of times that paper gets cited (Letchford et al.,
2015).
For an empirical economics paper—that is, a paper that asks an empirical
question of the form “What is the effect of D on y?”—it is safe to go with a
title of the form “The Impacts of D on y: Evidence from [the Context You
Are Studying].” A variant on this theme is a title of the form “D and y,”
with or without the subtitle after the semicolon.
There is also the question of whether you should be cute or funny—for
lack of a better term, let’s refer to either as “clever”—in your title. If you
are going to have a clever title, make sure it appeals to as many people as
possible, and make sure it actually makes sense. What often works here is
common sayings, adages, dicta, proverbs, short biblical passages, or titles of
famous films, books, or TV shows. Ultimately, if you are going to take the
clever route, make sure the cleverness is warranted, and that the clever part
of your title perfectly fits your paper.