Last week, two of my colleagues and I were invited to a professional development workshop held by the PhD students in the Sanford School of Public Policy on the topic of getting the most out of a PhD.
Specifically, the PhD students wanted to know what we had done (and when) in years 1 to 5 of our doctoral studies, and how we had navigated the process leading to our first publication.
Here are my slides for the workshop, and here is the audio, which you can also stream below. I speak from the beginning until about 16:00, when Nick Carnes takes over. Amar Hamoudi starts at around 28:00.
Contributing to Public Goods: My 20 Rules for Refereeing
The development economics blogosphere has been abuzz with talk of refereeing lately. Here are some words of advice from Quarterly Journal of Economics editor Larry Katz in an interview with Berk Özler on the Development Impacts blog, here is David McKenzie on the same blog, and here is Chris Blattman.
I cannot possibly claim to be among the best referees, but by my count, I have refereed
5657 papers and two book manuscripts since 2005, and I do take pride in my refereeing, which might explain why I was asked to become associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics for 2012-2015.As such, I figured I should chime in with my own advice about how to referee papers. I cannot say I always follow every single one of the 20 rules that follow but those are, by and large, the rules I try to live by as a referee. Some of those rules are derived from a similar list by Chris Barrett, who gave the students in his graduate empirical development micro class a list of such rules.
Because the following list is highly idiosyncratic, I would be very happy to hear about your own rules in the comments. And because this is a specialized post, I’m placing the list under the fold.