Doing Economics

1
Introduction
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments,
when they aren’t trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
—Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
When I started graduate school in 2001, someone—I wish I could
remember who, after 20 years—suggested I buy a copy of William
Thomson’s A Guide for the Young Economist. Considering when and where
I earned my PhD, this was an excellent recommendation: at the turn of the
century, economics had not quite yet taken an empirical turn and, consistent
with Leijonhufvud’s (1973) tongue-in-cheek ethnography of the profession
three decades prior, theory still had pride of place in economics. This was
especially true at Cornell, where the Department of Economics’ leading
faculty members at the time were theorists, from whom even Applied
Economics graduate students like me had to take their first-year courses.
For me and many of my classmates, Thomson’s book was a treasure trove
of advice on how to write, present, and review theoretical papers in
economics.
Twenty years later, economics has become resolutely more empirical as a
result of increasing data availability and the decreasing costs of
computational power (Backhouse and Cherrier 2017a, 2017b). Nowadays,
an overwhelming majority of young economists are drawn to applied fields
when the time comes to specialize. Indeed, seven of the last ten recipients
of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the US-based economist under
the age of 40 who has made the most significant contribution to economic
thought or knowledge, have been applied economists. Similarly, about half
of the ten most recent Nobel Prizes in Economic Sciences have been
awarded to economists whose work is mainly empirical. Economics-
adjacent disciplines (e.g., business, public policy) and other social-science
disciplines (e.g., political science, sociology) have followed suit, and have
likewise become much more empirical. Yet there is no guide available to

---

applied economists that does what Thomson’s book did for budding
economic theorists.
In a 1999 interview on NPR, science fiction author William Gibson said
that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Likewise
with a lot of the information contained in this book: it is already here, it is
just not evenly distributed. This is especially so given that many graduate
programs in economics, applied economics, business, or public policy—
programs that purport to train people in the art of doing research, writing
about it, presenting it, and so on—do not systematically train students in
what it means to work as a research economist. Even when one manages to
glean some of that knowledge from one’s advisors and other mentors, it
usually comes in bits and pieces, when those advisors and other mentors are
trying to teach one something else altogether.
I would go further: I believe that with respect to technical skills, most
PhD programs train their students in ways that are roughly comparable.
Where the quality of training differs between “good” and “bad” PhD
programs is in whether students are taught the kind of interstitial knowledge
presented in this book. In other words, there is a substantial hidden
curriculum when it comes to doing economics.
My objective in writing this book is to help equip anyone who has the
time to read it with some of the tools necessary to apprehend life as a
research economist.
Before I address what this book will be discussing, I should address what
it will not be discussing, and why.
There are library stacks full of books dedicated to teaching, and I have
never felt particularly effective in the classroom, so I will not be discussing
teaching. I will also not be covering the job market for PhD economists, as
there are a myriad of resources dedicated to that topic (see for instance
Cawley 2018). Moreover, in the case of both teaching and the job market,
things are changing so rapidly (e.g., the widespread adoption of
videotelephony that was forced on almost all of us in early 2020) that
discussing those topics would render this book dated before it reaches its
readers’ hands.
Graduate programs aim to train researchers, and the primary means by
which a researcher communicates her findings is by writing them up in the
form of papers. I thus start in chapter 2 with how to write papers. This

---

chapter is the result of seeing students struggle with the same things over
and over during the course of teaching our department’s second-year paper
seminar for six years. In fact, it is my hope that this chapter will provide a
convenient syllabus outline for anyone teaching a one- or two-semester
qualifying research paper seminar.
Having written a paper, a researcher will often seek to improve it by
incorporating other researchers’ comments on her work. The easiest way to
solicit other researchers’ comments on one’s work is by presenting it to
them in the context of seminars, conferences, and workshops. Chapter 3
thus discusses how to give talks.
Once she has incorporated those comments by other researchers that
ultimately allowed her to improve her work, a researcher will seek to
submit that work to a peer-reviewed journal. Most first-time submitters to
peer-reviewed journals, however, have little to no idea what to expect from
the process. Chapter 4 thus offer a discussion of how to navigate the peer-
review process.
There was a time when a social scientist could spend her whole career
without having to get grants to fund her work. But with ever-declining
numbers of economists doing theory, and with many of the publicly
available data sets having been picked clean a long time ago, a social
scientist who wishes to sustain her research agenda will more often than not
have to find funding to assemble, collect, clean, and analyze data, and in
some departments, one only gets to work with graduate students by funding
them through grants. Chapter 5 thus discusses the various aspects of
funding one’s research program through grants.
In most professions, opportunities arise for professional service, but
perhaps nowhere more so than when working as a researcher. Universities
are governed by faculty; professional associations, though they sometimes
hire professional administrative staff, are nevertheless run by people from
the profession they represent; institutions rely on peers to evaluate their
own for tenure or promotion; and most peer-reviewed journals worth
publishing in rely on reviewers and editors who are researchers themselves.
Moreover, in the last ten years or so, many of the conversations between
colleagues that used to take place over coffee or lunch have gone public.
They are now taking place on social media, and have de facto become
public goods—and thus a form of professional service. But if she were to

---

try to figure out how much and what kind of service to do, or how to get to
do a specific kind of service, the average early-career researcher in
economics would be at a loss. Chapter 6 thus offers an in-depth discussion
of doing professional service.
Sooner or later, social scientists in academia have to advise students. Yet
beyond one’s own relationships with one’s advisors, there is little guidance
about how to advise graduate students. There is even less guidance about
how to advise undergraduates. Chapter 7 thus offers some thoughts about
advising graduate students (both master’s and PhD students) and
undergraduate students, and it differentiates those thoughts by type of
institution.
I conclude in chapter 8 by offering personal thoughts about the
economics profession as a whole, and about the many ways one can be
successful.

---