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Writing

Finding Ideas for Research

Paul Krugman How I Work. His basic rules are

  1. Listen to the Gentiles
  2. Question the question
  3. Dare to be silly
  4. Simplify, simplify

See Hal Varian. How to build an Economic Model in your spare time

The first step is to get an idea. This is not all that hard to do. The tricky part is to get a good idea. The way you do this is to come up with lots and lots of ideas and throw out all the ones that aren’t good.

But where to get ideas, that’s the question. Most graduate students are convinced that the way you get ideas is to read journal articles. But in my experience journals really aren’t a very good source of original ideas. You can get lots of things from journal articles—technique, insight, even truth. But most of the time you will only get someone else’s ideas. …

My suggestion is rather different: I think that you should look for your ideas outside the academic journals—in newspapers, in magazines, in conversations, and in TV and radio programs. …

Conversations, especially with people in business, are often very fruitful. Commerce is conducted in many ways, and most of them have never been subjected to a serious economic analysis. …

In many cases your ideas can come from your own life and experiences. …

Before you start trying to decide whether your idea is correct, you should stop to ask whether it is interesting. If it isn’t interesting, no one will care whether it is correct or not. So try it out on a few people—see if they think that it is worth pursuing. What would follow from this idea if it is correct? …

The first thing that most graduate students do is they rush to the literature to see if someone else had this idea already. However, my advice is to wait a bit before you look at the literature. Eventually you should do a thorough literature review, of course, but I think that you will do much better if you work on your idea for a few weeks before doing a systematic literature search….

Greg Mankiw, My Rules of Thumb:

Coming up with ideas is the hardest and least controllable part of the research process. It is somewhat easier if you have broad interests. Most obviously, broad interests give you more opportunities for success. A miner is more likely to strike gold if he looks over a large field than over the same field over and over again

Also the links in this Greg Mankiw Advice for Grad Students

Replications

Gary King has advice on how to turn a replication into a publishable paper:

And see the examples of students replications from his Harvard course at https://politicalsciencereplication.wordpress.com/

Famous replications.

  • David Broockman, Joahua Kalla, and Peter Aronow. 2015. Irregularities in LaCour (2014).
  • Homas Herndon, Michael Ash & Robert Pollin (2013). Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. Working Paper Series 322. Political Economy Research Institute. [URL]

However, although those replications are famous for finding fraud or obvious errors in the analysis, replications can lead to extensions and generate new ideas. This was the intent of Brookman, Kalla, and Aronow when starting the replication.