There is just over a week left until our deadline of Tuesday November 22 for our “blog your job market paper” series. We have started receiving submissions, and so I thought I’d share a few more tips (in addition to those already posted) for those of you who are still planning to submit something.
- Don’t write a big block of text with no breaks: Whether it is several subheadings, some bullet points or numbered lists, or something else, make the blog post easier for readers to read by using something to break the text up. Remember, readers might be reading this on a mobile phone or skimming it quickly to see if they think it interesting to read, so having 2 pages of solid text with nothing else will not hold reader attention.
- Make sure to give magnitudes, not just significance: don’t just say “we found the program increased education for women”, but tell us by how much, and, where appropriate, some benchmark to help us tell whether this is a big or small effect.
- Hyperlink any references, and spell the authors’ names correctly.
- Get quickly to what you did, and make clear what your methods are: while general motivation for why what you are doing is important is useful, you should be able to make the case for why we should care in a paragraph or less – then we want to hear about what you did, and how you did this. Then give key details – if you do an experiment, make clear the sample sizes, unit of randomization etc.; if you do difference-in-differences, make clear why the parallel trends assumption seems reasonable and what checks you did; if you use an IV, discuss the exclusion restriction and why it seems reasonable; etc.
- Look at previous years for examples: e.g. here is Sam Asher’s, who we hired; here is Mounir Karadja’s explanation of using an IV; and here is Paolo Abarcar’s clear explanation of an experiment he did.
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