Advice & Research Guides

Guides to writing research:

• Varanya Chaubey’s excellent small guide to structuring research communication. The little book on research writing.

• Kramarz, Angrist, et al’s review on getting started with empirical economics

• Claire Cook’s dense but useful guide to self-editing: Line by line: how to edit your own writing.

• Marc Bellemare’s guide on How to write applied papers in economics.

How to identify research topics among other insights, from a former mentor Susan Athey, in an interview on https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781849808460.xml

“My econometric theory was very similar. I’d be working on an empirical paper, and I’d say, “How can I think about the conditions under which this empirical approach would work?” And I would read papers with informal descriptions of the reasoning, and I would be dissatisfied. And so I would say, “Let me write this down, and if I do it formally, maybe then I’ll understand.” As I started writing things down, I would realize that there was a deeper, more general idea. And I felt that other people would benefit from having that clarity of conceptual insights in their own empirical work, and so I wrote it into econometric theory papers.4 Almost all of my very theoretical papers have been motivated by trying to solve an applied theory problem, and realizing that I would have more clarity about the specific problem if I understood the generality.”

On the transition from being a student with coursework to a researcher (from Paul Niehaus):

“An alternative way to create structure is to focus on your system. By system I mean the habits and routines you develop and practice on a regular basis. For example, attending the seminar each week, writing down three suggestions for ways to improve the paper, and meeting afterwards with a classmate to discuss your ideas is a practice you might incorporate into your system. In designing your system, your aim is to give yourself a high probability of eventually accomplishing your ultimate goal (come up with a great job market paper) even though you cannot predict with any certainty the sequence of events through which this will come about.”

Datasets

Spatial Data

• Climate Engine: https://app.climateengine.org/climateEngine. A collaborative project from the University of Idaho, the Desert Research Institute, and Google Earth Engine, they make it painless to quickly visualize trends in environmental conditions in your areas of interest.

• Google Earth Engine: https://earthengine.google.com/

Corporate & Company Info, Financial Inclusion

• TRASE (Transparency for Sustainable Economies)  “uses publicly available data to map the links between consumer countries via trading companies to the places of production in unprecedented detail. Trase can show how commodity exports are linked to agricultural conditions – including specific environmental and social risks – in the places where they are produced, allowing companies, governments and others to understand the risks and identify opportunities for more sustainable production. The database aims to cover over 70% of the total traded volume of major forest risk commodities, including soy, beef, palm oil, timber, pulp and paper, coffee, cocoa and aquaculture. The initial focus of Trase is on Latin American soy, followed by beef in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, palm oil in Indonesia and Colombia and coffee in Colombia.

• Findex: The Global Findex database is the world’s most comprehensive data set on how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk: https://globalfindex.worldbank.org/

• International Trade Center: https://www.intracen.org/

• Corporate Data Sheets: https://www.bvdinfo.com/en-us/our-products/data/international/orbis

Human health &

ag production

Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA): https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/lsms/initiatives/lsms-ISA

Demographic and Health Surveys: Ready-to-use data for over 90 countries from over 300 surveys are only a few clicks away. https://dhsprogram.com/data/

Google dataset search: https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/

The Townsend Thai village dataset

Casual Inference

Guides

Development Economics Data