From the O*Net database, i learned something today — oral skills presentation is the most important attribute in an economist is oral communication. We joked about this in seminar today, but in a sense its true. Once you’ve written a paper, you must explain it to people.
This reminds me of a joke told by Conan O’Brien when he was on Leno’s show. Conan shares something he learned from Stan Laurel (Laurel and Hardy) about telling a joke: ”Always do this. Tell the audience what you’re going to do. Do it. And then tell them it has been done.”
Tell them what you are going to do! How is the paper related to other papers? Lots of people ask this question. You want to reassure people that your work is part of the larger story of scientific advance. This is also a practical thing as well: when you want to come up with new work, you look at whats been done and think of ways to extend them.
Do it! What is the motivation? Really good papers are of the small model kind — present stylized facts and construct a model as a way to interpret the data, and then test your interpretation. Its good to have some kind of empirical regularity at the heart of your paper. There are exceptions, such as pure theory or pure empirical/econometric work.
Tell the its been done! What is the intuitive interpretation of your model? Relate your model to the motivation you were talking about earlier, and to the results of the papers that inspired you that you copied from.
