This page is a collection of tips and resources which I find helpful and correct, mostly intended for graduate research students, although there really helpful for any research economists and refer back to them regularly when I find the time or discipline. Please let me know if any links don’t work, or if you have any suggestions to add.
I also recommend Marc Bellemare’s book Doing Economics, and flag that’s he’s returned to long form writing in 2025 on the same blog, which covers many related topics. You can subscribe to get new ones via email when they come out.
Seminars
Writing Tips for PhD Students (see the part on seminars), John Cochrane
How to Give an Applied Micro Talk, Jesse Shapiro
Public Speaking for Academic Economists, Rachael Meager
22 Tips for Conference and Seminar Presentations, Marc Bellemare
The Big Five, Donald Cox
Job market seminar, Bruce Hansen
How to give a lunch talk, Adam Guren
Seminar slides, Bruce Hansen
Tips+Tricks with Beamer for Economists, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
Better Presentations, Jonathan Schwabish
Discussing
The Discussant’s Art, Chris Blattman
Discussing, refereeing, dealing with rejections, and keeping up to date, by me
Guidelines for Referee Reports, Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet
Refereeing (discussant tips relevant here and vice versa)
How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process, JEP
A checklist manifesto for peer review, Brendan Nyhan
How much to referee and how to do it, David McKenzie
Read bad papers, Marc Bellemare
My 20 Rules for Refereeing, Marc Bellemare
On commenting on writing, David Eil
How to write a good referee report, Tatyana Deryugina
Writing papers
Resources for writing well, by me
What I’ve been reading on writing, Chris Blattman
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, Paul Graham
Doing research, Paul Niehaus
PhD thesis research, where do I start? Don Davis
On research writing, David Weil
How to pick a dissertation project (and why it should not be a field experiment), Chris Blattman
The Determinants of… How Not to Do Social Science, Marc Bellemare
If I could start anew, Chris Barrett
How to build an economic model in your spare time, Hal Varian
How to write applied papers in economics, Marc Bellemare
Four Steps to an Applied Micro paper, Jesse Shapiro
The ten most important rules of writing your job market paper, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz
We need to talk more, Claudia Sahm (updated talk and post)
Writing as a social scientist, David Eil
How to write the introduction of your development economics paper, David Evans
Introduction formula, Keith Head
Conclusion formula, Marc Bellemare
Between the Introduction and the Conclusion, Marc Bellemare
Ten Commandments for Regression Tables, Keith Head
Editorial Insights: Cite Intelligently, Marc Bellemare
Figures for presentations and papers
Favourite Figures, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham
An Economist’s Guide to Visualizing Data, Jonathan Schwabish
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edwards Tufte
Fundamentals of Data Visualization, Claus Wilke
Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction, Kieran Healy
Publishing
How to Publish in Academic Journals, Marc Bellemare, 2017 and 2014 versions
A Q&A with Larry Katz, editor of QJE, Ozler and McKenzie
An Interview with Amitabh Chandra, Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, David Slusky
A Q&A with the editors of the WBER (in 2012), Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet
Practical Tips for Writing and Publishing Applied Economics Papers, Beatty and Shimshack
A Q&A with Arun Agrawal, editor of World Development (in 2013)
A Q&A with Maitreesh Ghatak, editor of the Journal of Development Economics (in 2012)
Navigating Peer Review, Chris Barrett
Ten journals for publishing a short economics paper, David Evans [Google doc] [Brahma GitHub]
Make your research known, ten tools to increase consumption of your research, David Evans
Getting started on empirical work
Hidden Curriculum, Scott Cunningham (mental health talk here, and “Not waving but drowning”)
Tricks of the trade, Marc Bellemare (see Marc’s whole course slides here)
Code and Data for the Social Sciences, Gentzkow and Shapiro
Stata coding guide, Julian Reif
The Stata Guide, Asjad Naqvi
Applied empirical methods, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (PhD course; graphs)
The Analysis of Household Surveys, Angus Deaton
Causal Inference: The Mixtape, Scott Cunningham
The Effect, Nick Huntington-Klein (see also, helpful Animated Plots)
Causal Analysis, Martin Huber (covers ML also)
Plausibly Exogenous Galore, Sangmin Oh
Data Science and Big Data for economists, Grant McDermott
ML and Structural Models in Microeconometrics, Simon Quinn
GIS Analysis for Applied Economists, Melissa Dell
Causal Inference with Spatial Data: ArcGIS 10 for Economics Research, Masayuki Kudamatu
Curated measurement and survey topics and methods topics, Development Impact
Metrics Mondays, Marc Bellemare
Podcasts I like
Devpolicy Talks | Causal inference: the remix | CGD Podcast | Conversations with Tyler | Economists on Zoom Getting Coffee | EconTalk | ePODstemology | Everything Hertz | Hidden Curriculum | Jolly Swagman | Paper Round | Probable Causation | Rocking Our Priors | TradeTalks
Other good sets of links and tips, with a fair bit of overlap
Agan | Albright | Backman | Bellemare | Blattman (on the right tab) | Button | Cai | CSWEP | Development Impact | Dingel | Doleac | Head | Klein | Kudamatsu (the tips O.G.) | Redding | Tello-Trillo | Roth