This page is a collection of tips and resources which I find helpful and for the most part correct. It is mostly intended for students.

If you made it here as a graduate student, consider blogging your development PhD research with Devpolicy.

You probably also want to pre-order Marc Bellemare’s forthcoming book “Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School―But Didn’t.”

Suggestions welcome. Let me know if any links don’t work. Cheers.

Seminars

1. What makes for a successful paper and seminar? Don Davis

2. Writing Tips for PhD Students (see the part on seminars), John Cochrane

3. How to Give an Applied Micro Talk, Jesse Shapiro

4. Public Speaking for Academic Economists, Rachael Meager

5. 22 Tips for Conference and Seminar Presentations, Marc Bellemare

6. The Big Five, Donald Cox

7. LSE PhD Seminar Guidelines

8. Job market seminar, Bruce Hansen

9. How to give a lunch talk, Adam Guren

10. Seminar slides, Bruce Hansen

11. Tips+Tricks with Beamer for Economists, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham

12. Better Presentations, Jonathan Schwabish

Discussing

1.  The Discussant’s Art, Chris Blattman

2. Discussing, refereeing, dealing with rejections, and keeping up to date, by me

3. Guidelines for Referee Reports, Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet

Refereeing (discussant tips are also relevant here, and vice versa)

1. Econometrica guidelines for referees

2. How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process, JEP

3. Preparing a referee report: guidelines and perspectives

4. A checklist manifesto for peer review, Brendan Nyhan

5. How much to referee and how to do it, David McKenzie

6. Read bad papers, Marc Bellemare

7. My 20 Rules for Refereeing, Marc Bellemare

8. On commenting on writing, David Eil

9. How to write a good referee report, Tatyana Deryugina

Writing papers

1. Resources for writing well, by me

2. What I’ve been reading on writing, Chris Blattman

3. Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, Paul Graham

4. Doing research, Paul Niehaus

5. PhD thesis research, where do I start? Don Davis

6. On research writing, David Weil

7. How to pick a dissertation project (and why it should not be a field experiment), Chris Blattman

8. The Determinants of… How Not to Do Social Science, Marc Bellemare

9. If I could start anew, Chris Barrett

10. How to build an economic model in your spare time, Hal Varian

11. How to write applied papers in economics, Marc Bellemare

12. Four Steps to an Applied Micro paper, Jesse Shapiro

13. The ten most important rules of writing your job market paper, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz

14. We need to talk more, Claudia Sahm (updated talk and post)

15. Writing as a social scientist, David Eil

16. How to write the introduction of your development economics paper, David Evans

17. Introduction formula, Keith Head

18. Conclusion formula, Marc Bellemare

19. Between the Introduction and the Conclusion, Marc Bellemare

20. Ten Commandments for Regression Tables, Keith Head

21. Editorial Insights: Cite Intelligently, Marc Bellemare

Figures for presentations and papers

1. Favourite Figures, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham

2. An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data, Jonathan Schwabish

3. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edwards Tufte

4. Fundamentals of Data Visualization, Claus Wilke

5. Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction, Kieran Healy

Publishing

1. How to Publish in Academic Journals, Marc Bellemare, 2017 and 2014 versions

2. A Q&A with Larry Katz, editor of QJE, Ozler and McKenzie

3. An Interview with Amitabh Chandra, Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, David Slusky

4. A Q&A with the editors of the WBER (in 2012), Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet

5. Practical Tips for Writing and Publishing Applied Economics Papers, Beatty and Shimshack

6. A Q&A with Arun Agrawal, editor of World Development (in 2013)

7. A Q&A with Maitreesh Ghatak, editor of the Journal of Development Economics (in 2012)

8. Navigating Peer Review, Chris Barrett

9. Ten journals for publishing a short economics paper, David Evans [Google doc] [Brahma GitHub]

10. Make your research known, ten tools to increase consumption of your research, David Evans

Getting started on empirical work

1. Hidden Curriculum, Scott Cunningham (mental health talk here, and “Not waving but drowning”)

2. Tricks of the trade, Marc Bellemare (see Marc’s whole course slides here)

3. Code and Data for the Social Sciences, Gentzkow and Shapiro

4. Good enough practices in scientific computing

5. Stata coding guide, Julian Reif

6. Stata Cheat Sheets / Programming with Stata

7. The Stata Guide, Asjad Naqvi

8. Applied empirical methods, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (PhD course; graphs)

9. The Analysis of Household Surveys, Angus Deaton

10. Causal Inference: The Mixtape, Scott Cunningham

11. The Effect, Nick Huntington-Klein (see also, helpful Animated Plots)

12. Matt Blackwell’s syllabus

13. Plausibly Exogenous Galore, Sangmin Oh

14. Data Science and Big Data for economists, Grant McDermott

15. ML and Structural Models in Microeconometrics, Simon Quinn

16. GIS Analysis for Applied Economists, Melissa Dell

17. Causal Inference with Spatial Data: ArcGIS 10 for Economics Research, Masayuki Kudamatu

18. EGAP Methods Guides

19. Curated measurement and survey topics and methods topics, Development Impact

20. Metrics Mondays, Marc Bellemare

Some other good sets of links and tips (with a fair bit of overlap)

1. Agan

2. Albright

3. Backman

4. Bellemare

5. Blattman (on the right tab)

6. Button

7. Cai

8. CSWEP

9. Development Impact

10. Dingel

11. Doleac

12. Head

13. Klein

14. Kudamatsu (the tips O.G.)

15. Redding

16. Tello-Trillo

17. Roth

Podcasts I still listen to (occasionally)

• ABC Pacific Beat

• Causal inference: the remix

• CGD Podcast

• Choiceology

• Conversations with Tyler

• Devpolicy Talks

• Economists on Zoom Getting Coffee

• EconTalk

• ePODstemology

• Everything Hertz

• Hidden Curriculum

• Jolly Swagman Podcast

• Memorandum of Understanding

• Paper Round

• Probable Causation

• Rocking Our Priors

• TradeTalks