An important skill that will derive from your knowledge of this course is understanding in simple terms what the main “comparison” papers are trying to make. For all of the following papers do the following exercise:
- Don’t read the title.
- Don’t read the abstract.
- Just read the section title “introduction” (i.e., the first section) and, just based on the introduction, express what the main comparison the paper is doing in non-technical terms.
- You’ll notice that (a) researchers may not be great writers, so there is a lot of misdirection, and (b) sometimes it is not as easy to tell as others.
- If you want to know the answer or are right, you can always look at the estimated regression, which should point out the answer.