Doing Economics

3.3.1 Serving as Discussant
Some of the most valuable conferences from the point of view of improving
your work are those that feature discussants. Serving as a discussant is a

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good opportunity for you to learn about others’ work and help them
improve it. But as with everything else, there is a set of best practices
related to serving as a discussant.
First of all, you should read the paper as you would when serving as a
reviewer for a journal. This does not necessarily mean that you should read
the paper down to the footnotes and appendices. If you have a clear sense
that you would recommend that the paper be rejected at a field journal, it
may not be necessary to read the entirety of a paper before you can
formulate high-level comments that can help the authors improve their
chances of getting a revise-and-resubmit.
Second, depending on how much time you have for your discussion
(typically five, at most 10 minutes), you should prepare a short presentation
with a view to helping the authors improve their paper. The best way to help
the authors improve their paper is by focusing on those things they can do
which will have the highest possible return at the margin. Your presentation
should include the following sections:
Summary of the Paper. In contrast to my idiosyncratic preferences
regarding how conference presentations should omit the conclusion, I have
seen many discussants whose slides included a summary of the paper
presented skip that summary by saying “We just saw the paper being
presented so I’ll skip this.” While a summary of one’s own paper
immediately after presenting one’s paper tends to be redundant, a summary
of a paper by someone else can be immensely valuable: no matter what the
authors say their paper is about in their abstract and introduction, the reader
will occasionally think that the paper is about something else. So providing
a summary of what you got out of a paper can be very helpful to the
authors.