By Patrick L. Warren
SIOE likes to highlight new work by young scholars in institutions and organizational economics. This is why we have the Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award. This year, I want to start a new tradition, blatently stolen from David McKenzie at the World Bank Development Impact Blog, and invite job-market candidates working in institutional and organizational economics to submit guest posts summarizing their job-market papers.
I like David's rules and tips, so I'm stealing those, too:
RULES
1. Write a blog post on your job market paper. It should have a title that is not the title of your paper. Your topic should fit into a broad definition of organizational and/or institutional economics.
2. Your post should not exceed 1,250 words and can include either one graph or one table.
3. If you'd like to include a figure or a table, save it in a blank PPT slide, save the file as a .jpg file, and send it separately. Send the rest of your submission as plain text ot html.
4. Your submission should therefore include your blog post, your paper (attached or linked to), the URL for your JM page, and a figure or table (as relevant) sent separately. Any papers you reference should be hyperlinked, do not include any footnotes.
5. The posts will appear as guest posts in the following format: "[TITLE]: Guest post by [NAME]" At the end of the post, please include a line that says something like: "[NAME] is a PhD student (post-doc) at [INSTITUTION].", and hyperlink to your personal webpage if you have one.
TIPS
1. Check with your main thesis advisor to see whether they think this is a good idea. After they have agreed and you have spent a good amount of time putting together your blog post, run it by them, other faculty, several people who are graduate students and some mates who are not. Revise and revise before submitting. Our initial impression of your blog will largely determine whether we post it on the SIOE blog or not.
2. Think of the process of writing this blog post as perfecting your “elevator pitch,” where the building is about 50-floors high. If you can craft a post that is an interesting story to which people would like to listen, you have succeeded. Stay away from dry, academic descriptions of your paper like the one on your JM webpage.
3. The title and the first paragraph are usually the most important part of a blog post – I have received emails from people who told me they only read a certain post because of the title. So, spend some time on those to grab the reader with your introduction.
4. It's a good rule of thumb to cite at least a couple of other papers from the literature motivating the question before getting to your own. Please hyperlink to these.
5. Bulleted or numbered summaries seem to work well, but they are not for everyone or every paper.
6. It’s perfectly OK for your blog to talk about one interesting thing about your paper – your contribution. Don’t try to summarize your entire paper, data, ID strategy, robustness checks etc. Spend your energy on motivating the question, why it is interesting, and what you find.
7. Don't oversell your paper and don't speculate. Confront the weaknesses (of the data or methodology) in your paper head on and qualify your findings. You may have a one-paragraph sub-section titled “Limitations of the study.”
Please send your materials via email to: patrick.lee.warren at gmail by November 22nd at midnight. I'll let you know within a couple weeks, and make the posts over late November and early December.