How To Sign Pennsylvania Banking Presentation

How to industry sign banking pennsylvania presentation simple

can you read the back okay I'll try to speak up if I start to faint just raise your hand to let me know so big thanks again to Bill and Jeff I'm gonna try and convince you over the next 30 or 45 minutes I'm not gonna take the whole hour or however long we have that's just way too much time I'm gonna trying to convince you that it's actually something that's really important something you should pay attention to and actually a skill in which it's worth investing and I'll motivate to talk with just a brief anecdote based on my my own personal experience which is the following so when I was paged he's doing earthly I was in statistics and economics and for my statistics thesis I sat down with my advisor David Rankin at his house and to talk about Mike my thesis and I was really excited you know I done a bunch of cool math I had a really neat application I had a new proof I wanted to show on snap down at his breakfast table he took the paper and he looked at the first sentence and he read it to himself and then he read it out loud and I was a little bit frustrated I wanted to get to the math and the proof I mean it was really cool lots of Greek symbols and their goals and I was really excited and he read the sentence out loud and he looked at me and he said Mike wasn't trying to save her and I looked at him and then I explained what I was trying to say you know took me about five minutes to explain that one sentence and he looked at me he started chuckling he says but that lesson and those three hours in this house with them really impressed upon me and that's what I want to share with you today hopefully in a somewhat less painful manner this presentation I want to spend most of the time talking about writing and communicating I'll talk a little bit on the backend time time assuming we have enough time about issue other issues related to research in particular data and programming your light of recent trends that I've seen in the profession okay so let me ask just an informal question I think standing up and lecturing listening to myself speak so don't hesitate to ask questions how many people here took a class on writing in their graduate program it's it's a little bit odd that that response rate is so low given that our job really was to write hey that's what we did I realize a lot comes into those papers but the end of the day we're writers and yet we rarely taught how to write much of our training has nothing to do with writing and then we graduate and now we are right back where you reports we have to write committee reports you have to write scientific neighbors and so writing well is really hard at least it is for me and I've struggled with it my entire career but what I found least in the four years I was at the JAF one of the biggest hurdles that authors and reviewers had as well as myself was simply communicating with all of the parties people and so reviewers like they complain about the paper that you complain about the writing they complain about the analysis they complain about the identification the authors would complain about the referees they don't understand what I'm talking about they just don't understand they're wrong you like what you don't understand what I'm talking about you're wrong you know you're all just idiots and you've missed the brilliance in this Nobel prize-winning paper you know what you know taking a step back it really was an amazing humbling experience being involved in the process but taking a step back but I found what my my call editors what agreement is that quite often a significant hurdle in the reading process was just miscommunication papers aren't written particularly clearly not not necessarily by intention on the contrary but the messages weren't communicated clearly enough which led to confusion by the review or sometimes confusion by the editor and and vice versa sometimes the referees concerns weren't communicating clearly to the authors so the author's would get frustrated and I don't want to couch this as some big failure of the review process merely it's it's a challenge in the review process this ability to communicate clearly and and so a lot of the time I found that one of the biggest hurdles in the revisions is just getting the authors as well as the referees to communicate more clearly to write more clearly and write more precisely so I want to talk about some observations I've had and please I hope you'll share some of your own just take it easy on me okay so here we go so I want to use some general ideas to consider when you're writing a paper okay okay this is based on my experience I want to be clear there's no one right way to write a paper and so when you write when you look at really good papers they vary quite dramatically paper and I'll give some examples later on to that effect that said every single good paper I've ever read a read excuse me it does have a few common features that you can extract that I'll try to touch on and so what I want you to walk out of here with is I want you to walk out of here with the impression that yeah it's worth spending some time writing it's worth spending some time thinking about what I'm doing and it's worth spending some time taking thinking about how other people who haven't spent the last two years working on this project so let's talk about whenever I want to page these students and I shouldn't just say that whenever I talk to other scholars colleagues such as you whenever I'm writing a paper there's always five questions like my paper had better answer quickly and clearly right now something's wrong either my writing is terrible I don't understand what I'm really doing and by the way both happened in my project especially in the beginning all right what economic question and I emphasized economic because there's lots of questions one can ask what are you going to eat for breakfast today that's a question but it's not clear that that the answer to that question should show up in the jail for the jam here or adjourn and so what economic question are you asking and something I want to emphasize the answers to these questions should either the explicit or immediate okay so I pulled out here's here's a sentence from slang friend-ish news ninety-two right how do firms choose debt levels and white firms are even both industry sometimes change how much debt they up that's the question it's right in your face it's obvious and in a minute I'll get to why it's important if it isn't already obvious in terms of a finance round so so my paper with mark the title of the paper was do firms be balanced their capital structures that's the question that permeates the rest of the paper but it's simple it's obvious it's clear whether or not it's important depends upon your background understanding and so we'll talk about motivation in a second but if you can't tell me what economic question you are asking in one sentence you should really reflect on what am i answer but what am i doing why am i doing it because I often you know a lot of complaints I would hear from referees this seems like an exercise like it's a problem that someone addresses it's not why you're doing it what are we gonna get out of this at the end of the day why is this what is the question and sometimes it doesn't have to be explicit right the economic question can be implied but it's still obvious nonetheless so I I pulled out a couple of quotes from autiful and armours qj8 right I'm gonna post the slides so our goal in this analysis is to incur the exam competing explanations to the subprime mortgage expansion and subsequent immobilizes that's what they're doing in this paper that's not a question that's a statement but inclining the statement is in the economic question it's clear what they are doing what the goal of the paper is ER or Sam Robin and Jeremy's Hey right we study how government debt should optimally determine the maturity structure of its debt now you can ask why that's important or relevant but you can't you can't ask well what are they doing or what question of answer it's right there so you know it's interesting it seems like an easy thing to do or say right have a clear well-defined economic question but I can't tell you how many papers I've seen and I'm sure you have as well do you think a little bit where it's actually kind of hard to figure out what are they doing what are the author's trying to do here and so as well as spending some time preferably earlier in the process than later figuring out what it is you're doing what question are you answer and again please don't hesitate to ask questions or comment my voice goes quickly I'm teaching this semester all right okay so second why is the question important again right what I'm eating for breakfast is a question but who cares so somehow tell me why it's important if it isn't obvious I think everybody can agree they these questions right here do not need much motivation right Octus and armor or Sam and Jeremy's question they don't need a lot of motivation if you're in finance if you study finance understanding financial policy is one of the pillars of finance so it's not a whole lot of motivation required for that you know do farms rebalance their capital structures that might need some motivation and indeed we had to motivate it by showing that recent research up to that point actually questioned whether firms were optimizing or had some type of target capital structure that was sort of a big issue in the literature the big issue point of contention so we had to spend a little time motivated and so if I think about you know asset pricing papers what I care about you know these asset pricing models these factor models in some instances well write asset price formation is a fundamental issue in understanding financial markets and the allocation of capital financial policy is critical for firm corporate behavior both on the financing side the left side or the right side of the balance sheet for the left side of the balance sheet real activity so help us understand why what you're doing why the question you're asking is actually important why should I be in 60 pages okay and so sometimes it's going to require some explicit motivation I gave the example of two fruits rebalance their capital why do I care I care why didn't you balance their cap because some studies saving they don't there is no target capital structure just varies all over the place without value implications wait a second that's important or lots of an armor right the sharp rise in most mortgages well rates has led to the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression we want to understand what's what was behind the Great Depression what were the failures what were the economic mechanisms that leg were precipitated this crisis that's why the question they're investigating is really important make it explicit don't assume how much of your reader just make it explicit I don't know about you but certainly when I was younger when I was younger but right I was so enthralled with sort of the technical aspects and the analysis and you know how I come up with clever ways to solve technical problems I really lost sight of the point of the paper you know as a student I don't care about all that I'm not a mathematician and my advisers reminded me affect repeatedly as a student like I'm an economist and I want to answer interesting economic questions all that stuff the only reason for that analysis and technical block probably if it's even there it's all to answer an interesting economic class so I always say if you can't quickly convey and motivate the question on which you work okay there's a problem and by the way I say that having struggled with that in the vast majority of the papers I've read when I start down here's a cool idea but then I need to figure out well it's gonna be cool to anyone else I think it's interesting but will anyone else think it's interesting and so I sit down whenever I work with PhD students they come into my office and it's really it's kind of funny right they walk in they're really kind of timid I think they're a little scared which is frightening because I'm just a you know sure and then they tell me and I say okay you know what are you doing and then they spend ten minutes talking I still have no idea what they're doing they have no idea and so then begins an hour-long process of going back and forth trying to figure out okay what question are you asking and why is it important and usually right we get there we get there so just think about that at the beginning before you invest all that time into something that you really don't know what it is when you're done you write a bunch of regression you've got a bunch of tables booked chairs there are lots of regressions in tables okay three what are your primary findings and results okay highlight your key findings funky might if you're anything like me or the rest the rest of us right we've got all these tables tons of numbers everywhere lots of coefficients T statistics you name it but what is the key finding right what what is that that new new result or new results and when I say results I don't mean 37 I mean one or two or three just what are the key results of the paper right so here you make sure it's job market paper right he had a really interesting paper I find the bank depended earns borrow from well capitalized banks while firms with access to bought to the bond market borrow from banks with less capital and so what he was basically showing what he's finding is that there's a selection mechanism in the bank borrower match and that selection mechanism is in large part not entirely but in large part driven by financial constraints with our own firms that's a key finding so Peter DeMars on my Fishman in their contracting paper I think this is the RFS paper right after solving for a common tracked as an optimal mechanism we demonstrate that it can be implemented by a combination of equity long-term debt and a line of credit that's their key finding right there's 30 pages right stochastic calculus actually I think this was the street time anyway a lot of math okay but this is really linked the key finding there are certainly other reinforcing findings and supplemental findings but the end of the day this is a key takeaway they have an optimal contract or an optimal mechanism that can be implemented with securities we see in practice and then graduation and co-authors I think chair at Harvard and I'm leaving some people out for sure apology at all right they have an interesting paper where if you think about cashing on firm's balance sheets it's actually not cash or safe assets as we might traditionally think of 40% the firm's financial portfolios or 6% of total assets are actually risky investments things like equity that's the key finding and so if you've got a mass or a flood of different findings and you all do what's the what's the key what's the key result that's gonna contain your message which I'll get to in just a minute what is that one or two where are those two results and again I want to be careful I don't want I don't want to try and convey that there's only one you should only have one result that's not the message right every paper is different every writing style is different but you should be able to tell me what you see finding what's fun you should be able to say that relatively quickly okay questions or anything so far yeah well I guess it kind of depends on how you define the question if I have a paper that's asking how you first choose their capital structure and what is the proper asset pricing model for equities and then I want to know the optimal contract in a nonprofit setting those are three page three questions that probably should be in three different papers but if I want to know how firms choose their capital structure and what the mechanisms are behind those decisions well there's maybe two questions but they go hand-in-hand to really understand the first I need to answer the second as well and so it's a look at unfortunately everything's a little subjective my colleague prof. Stambaugh always likes to say you know you want to be careful not to bite off more than you can chew well right and so if you can't answer one question you know you're ot able to answer one question convincingly in a compelling manner taking on another question that may be too much but again there's no one-size-fits-all and I can arguably look at any of my papers and say I'm really answer about four or five questions but they all happen to be pointing in the same direction right I'm trying to understand how firms choose their capital structure for example right I'm trying to understand security design problem in that contract and to do that well I need to answer a couple of supplementary questions that make sense that's a good question so how do you know what question is important I think before you even answer that you better make sure it's important to you and interesting to you otherwise you're not you're not going to answer it well so I always like to think of do I care about this and then I need to then figure out well is this important what is the scope of this question what literature - what literature my speaking is it is it a big question these are subjective issues so I mean part of that can be that's a good question I think so I think that's part of it I think that's part so obviously presenting the paper and getting feedback is going to be critical it's not they asked is the answer this question just obvious but I'd like to set up a bunch of straw man hypotheses that are kind of silly is there any kind of tension in answering the question and again I I do like to go back to has it fit within the literature is it really moving the literature forward am i resolving an existing conflict am i filling a gap in a literature I think these are some of the questions to understand but that's hard I think once you get a lot of feedback that's going to be helpful on the other hand you don't I go presenting papers and seminars that are no one's gonna care about so I think you can answer that question to some degree before you go present the other the other issues remember what's important is somewhat in the eye of the beholder other questions should you make mention what I like to I like to I like people to understand what I'm doing in my paper and what I find as quickly as possible I'm not writing a murder mystery or where everyone's on the edge of their seat until the conclusion to find out what I found because they're never gonna get there give them all the interesting stuff unadulterated right up front as quickly as possible and you know it takes some confidence to write like that I have to confess you know when I started out I was all I was intimidated a more timid writer I like to think I'm a little bit more confident now like to say this is what I'm doing and it comes back to you know knowing that hey other people care about this issue so yeah I get it up front and also you know another thing I found this a lot of times people and I'm not sure why'd they spend a lot of time talking about other papers in the introduction I don't want to know about other things I don't want anything long lit review I really have to pay tribute and homage to everyone who came before you piss people off and things like that but but you can do that you can do that without you know burying what you are doing right I wonder what you're doing okay and then for what's your answer to the question in other words that this is really important and this is something I often find missing in a lot of papers people conflate their primary findings with the economic message of the paper right and so I'll use a on it and then and I think this is Vic run yeah there's another author I'm always forgetting all this this is and reverse order Sarah at all right our findings suggest that existing securitization practices did adversely affect the screening incentives of lenders that is an economic message is the answer to an economic question right that is different from their findings their findings are the portfolio that is more likely to be securitized to be secured deputize default fight around ten to twenty five percent more than a similar risk profile group with a lower probability of securitization that's their find extra primary finding your job is to take your primary findings and infer from that an economic message that's what you want to highlight in the paper the analysis and results are amused to an end what's the answer to the economic question and so a lot of papers as I mentioned failed to cleanly and clearly interpret their findings and that's also where the point of contention often arises with reviewers you interpret your findings one way they interpret your findings another way and then finally what's new what are we learning that we didn't already know and this is this seems obvious because right everything we do hasn't been done before in some literal sense right this you know someone so didn't run this regression I added a different variable on the right hand side I have a new control I clustered my standard errors on and on and on but but that's really not what readers are looking for right that's not what you look for when you pick up a paper you want to know what is the new economic message I'm getting out of this and sometimes that economic message may not even be new and that's okay rather you're coming in to clarify debate in the literature so the answers are out there the problem is they're conflicting and you're coming in with new data a new identification strategy a new hypothesis to shed light on this debate there's some really famous examples of that in just a bit but I want to know what's new you so this is related to couching your your paper in the context of the existing literature five please maybe once again I'm biased I feel reviews to be just me right don't summarize minded again this is obviously all my opinion don't spend waist-high summarizing other gamers that's not the goal of a live review or couching you're relating your paper to the relevant literature rather help me understand how what you're doing is building on or different from existing work don't say so and so 2010 did this I can read that and figure that out tell me how what you're doing is different how it's showing what they did was wrong how it's building on what they did how its clarifying what they did okay again hey couch your paper in the context of other papers but talk about your paper not theirs percent and so if you repeat analysis on a different data set why are you doing that why are you doing that why would that why would I care I'm actually gonna ask you a question right now this is free view what would be a rationale and motivation for repeating analysis on a different data set okay so maybe I want to include the effects or understand how the effects vary over the business cycle or how they respond in rochette they're recessive recessionary setting okay good so that's one example what's another example I also could you justify just doing the same thing on a different data set and I want to be loose with doing the same thing okay why do I care why do I care if different sized firms have different results okay good they insofar as maybe different sized firms reflect varying degrees of exposure to financial constraints maybe I can learn something about the role of constraints in corporate behavior possibly I don't have to motivate why size as a proxy for financial constraints and nothing else which is gonna be hard but but that's right that's right okay why do I care about differences between emerging economies and developed economies and I want to be careful I'm not trying to be a jerk here you're all looking at me honestly is that you can do different things but you need to be able to answer why they're doing it in terms of economics so why would I care about how lying corporate behavior regarding financial policy differs across an emerging that come from an emerging economy versus a firm in a developed economy okay good so maybe there's institutional differences and those institutional differences can help me disentangle competing explanations for corporate behavior maybe the tax codes are radically different maybe what's that a macro economics is way to make in general horse macroeconomics are different right we need to be able to draw those macro economic differences back to some motivating theory back to economics right and you need to make those ties explicitly okay because there are rules for doing Studies on different data sets in asset pricing lots of studies will look at fom a French three factor five factor model in another country why it's a form of external validation for studies that argue that that's the proper asset pricing model in the US but does it hold more generally it's an out-of-sample study better identification strategies I'm going to give a couple examples that then touch on that right maybe there's a huge debate in the literature so a question has been answered to death over twenty years but they're conflicting answers how do we resolve this well maybe the existing studies couldn't really get at the underlying and dodging ad problem well and in comes another study with a better identification strategy that can actually shed some light on the debate even though the questions been out there for 30 years alright and different results different results aren't necessarily good unless you can tell me in a compelling and click a clear and convincing way why those different results help me learn something new about the underlying economics oh here's my lit review Rand take it easy on the Lib reviews okay one thing though I will say and and I was I was guilty of this when I was just starting out don't try to hopefully not to agree I mean Evan works don't try to hide or under play a reference a relevant paper that's just a really easy way to put the referee on guard on the date on the defense or readers more generally you should take those and just put them front and center and show exactly why what you're doing is different if you can't then maybe what you're doing isn't different so don't run away from related neighbors use them use them to clearly distinguish so that no one can say you know this seems a lot like so-and-so numb out so-and-so is actually quite different here's how all right you know these questions won't kind of obvious and straightforward you know are actually really hard to answer I struggle with them to this day I struggle with okay what but that's okay you should struggle and but you have to answer you have to answer if you can't it means you need to rethink either your understanding or the paper itself and if you can't answer them clearly and concisely in the introduction that's reflective of something another problem another issue you should be able to get these things out so the reader can read the paper knowing why they're reading the paper and to what end so let me get some more targeted suggestions so I go back to that anecdote I told at the beginning when my advisor said Mike what are you trying to say here is it also the only person ever called me Mike but Mike what are you trying to say and then I rambled for five minutes look when I write something I actually think about someone sitting across from me and I'm just telling them what I'm so I try to write like I speak without all the pauses and bedroom the other thing I like to do is I like to read outside my area so so most of my work is in corporate finance I seem to be doing asset pricing these days but I like to read outside of it so I read a lot of bio and labor and I do that for a variety of reasons just to understand the broader literature in economics but also because a lot of ideas that we see cropping up and say corporate finance actually have their origins in labor and i/o especially when it comes to analysis whether it's reduced form clever identification strategies or its structural work a lot of the seeds of that began in other fields and so it's really useful to see how those fields apply different techniques and the concerns and then translate them over to our setting I think there's a lot to be learned the other thing to do is to read a lot and write a lot so I write and I write and I rewrite and I rewrite constantly and so you know when I go back and forth with my co-authors you know the last part of the file name is underscored the number right version number and it's not uncommon to be on the score be 51 it's just not we just go back and forth from that because I want you know you gotta cut it at some point right I mean we need to get tenure we need to get promote we and we want to publish right and the other thing to keep in mind is you will never write the perfect paper when you submit it it's gonna come back it will never come back with this is the greatest paper I've read publish it as is I've never seen that before I waited four years for it I never spied okay there'll be always something to harp on right but it should be clear just to mitigate confusion that's what you want to avoid right and then right as you speak okay sort of and finally you know when you talk to your when you talk with your colleagues about your paper they can't understand it really quickly what you're doing why you're doing why it's important either to two things are going either you're not right well you're not communicating it clearly enough you haven't thought pard enough about it or actually you just don't understand it a lot of times we write and we learn as we write and so those first 20 versions I write are quite often me sort of learning at a deeper level what I'm doing you want to move past that so you understand it so well you can now teach it to others right don't be pedantic but that's what you're doing in your papers you're explain your your you're really telling people very clearly what they're doing and then don't assume you know everybody just kind of assumes so much of the readers and that's because we've been working on that paper for one two three longer years well I'm thinking of your paper for the first time China pains picking up your paper for the first time he's never seen it now he's reading it so he doesn't know that actually in Table five you did this extra you added these controls or when you say this is obviously obviously when firms grow agency costs go up no not obviously you can't you're saying of the textile saying obviously asked is it really obvious okay and err on the side of inclusive err on the side of inclusion but avoid redundancy right eight your point clearly once the other thing is there was another theme in the last ten years has been we identified the causal effect of Y on X yeah there it is we identify the causal effect of X on Y or we solve the endogenous a problem no you know you don't I know you think you did and I know you saw someone else write that and one of the top journals but but they didn't either okay so be more scientific and less Cavalier and you're writing right confidently but not arrogantly there's a really important distinction so as opposed to right solving and dodging ad take a number of steps to mitigate the scope for alternative interpretations of our evidence that's what you're doing and you can only make it so far the fact is there are practical limitations on data that's okay we all face the same limitations so be honest about it your readers going to appreciate it all right and in the intros 1011 page intros referees have lots of papers to read editors have even more right three hours across our destiny here I got a read you know a 60 page paint percent which is in the intro I'm just you can't tell me what you're doing okay rein them in no so so john cochran likes to use the term no throat-clearing I say no warm-up right don't don't ease me into the paper right I'm a big boy tell me what you're doing really quickly and I'll be grateful I'll be grateful okay and get to the model data or results as quickly as possible if the first you don't start talking about your results and I don't care if it's a theory paper and empirical day review if you're waiting to page 20 to get to your results I'm checked out I just can't I mean it's very hard to why why is it taking so long you're warming me up you're getting me prepared but again it's not a mystery novel get to the point as quickly as possible and I remember the paper with mark my 2004 55 paper with mark on different rebalance o capital structure we did that and we had an untried it took us 18 19 pages to get to the results and a referee wrote back thank God for our referee who had just had the patience of a saint and recognized you know junior faculty much mark was a PhD student you know we didn't know we're doing he's like will you just show me the primary result right off the bat so we'd be reversed everybody I put all the cool technical stuff there's a dynamic duration model that move towards the back and I put a picture we put a picture showing that firms actually if you look at their leverage ratio after after they they make a financing decisions and comes back into you put that picture right there on page seven or ages just as quickly as possible and the irony is nobody cares really about the complicated econometrics they all point at the picture hold up see the rebalance that's it I see it clip that up get to your results quicker all right so we're gonna sit over there okay are there any questions about anything so so the question is for those of you teachers why bark papers have to be 30 pages long I'm not including tables and I wish they worked I really wish they'd want I don't think they need to be 30 40 pages long frankly I think it's an unfortunate artifact of the progression of the art partly due to the progression of the profession where we're we're answering questions that are making small somewhat smaller contributions right we're sort of finding niches I also think it's an artifact of the review process where referees come in and say hey you need to do this this is this and so part of our job as editors was to reign in referees as best we could and so I hope is that maybe we can turn the tide a little bit I know certainly Ken Bruno and I tried to rein things in I hope other editors I believe other end but I I agree with you they shouldn't have to be that long they unfortunately are and I think part of it is also to try and head off concerns right so we blow papers with all these robustness tests 90% of which are ridiculous because they address hypotheses that are totally implausible right most of that can be condensed to one or two you know nice SIBO tests or falsification test to kind of mitigate the scope these are interpretations so I'm with you checking I hope the literature the profession moves in that direction and I don't think we're alone I actually think you should be able to answer those questions at the start otherwise you may get deep into a paper and say oh I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing in fact I don't understand how you can't have answers even if they're not sharpened that's okay but some answer to guide the analysis because how can you what analysis can you do if you don't understand the question you're trying to answer and what the alternative answers are to that question what do you request ins why are you running the regressions are running so I think the earlier the better I realize it's not often the case but it should be in my opinion okay all right so let me give you some examples and ology asks you so David card the Mariel boatlift how many people are actually familiar with that paper not one Wow read it this is actually a very famous paper about well the question is to what extent do immigrants impact the labor market for less skilled workers okay so right there right up front in his paper you have the question and it's important the key issue for policy that's the question he is going after and why it's important his here is what he looked at as he looked at the does anyone here know what the Mariel boatlift was where a boat lift is was a giant influx of human immigrants back in the I think early eighties from Cuba to Miami South Florida okay so the influx of immigrants from that boat lift had virtually no effect on wages or unemployment rates of less skilled workers Wow that's the key result right he couldn't find a difference a change in wages for less skilled workers as a result consequence of this influx of immigrants and it really was a very clever natural experiment and so the economic message here is immigration doesn't necessarily lead to reduce labor market opportunities which is one of the primary concerns about immigrants one of the primary economic concerns I should say and this isn't a new question right people had thought about intubated immigration policy in light of the potential economic effects of immigrants lots of people had studied it what David did okay is he said well wait a second if we want to answer this question properly we need to recognize that if we're just going to look at the correlation across cities between the proportion of immigrants and wages we have a problem because immigrants select in two different cities with different characteristics and so any differential in wages across cities may have nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with local demand or local economic conditions and so this is a paper that attacked an old question didn't give a new answer right other studies had had said you know it's unclear whether or not immigrants affect the labor market for less skilled workers when he did so in a novel manner that was more convincing okay that addressed some of the concerns levied against previous studies and what's interesting is you know he's I'm pretty sure lucid his key result actually doesn't show up and I don't think it shows up in the introduction I actually think it shows up in the conclusion and I don't think that's a knock against his paper per se because you can actually see it in the abstract as well but I think it goes to show that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to writing just be clear and the other thing I really like about this paper it's a very famous paper you should read it and the other thing I really like is despite the clear-cut nature of these findings some caution is required in their interpretation here's David card one of the most famous labor economist in our profession being very clear that you can only take away so much from what you sang shouldn't you be the same be precise recognize your limitations that that is not the same thing as identifying a weakness on the contrary I think it's reinforcing what exactly he can speak to in his paper and what he can't and Eso so just so this isn't all empirical work adding on a Bolton people know this paper good better it's one of the most important financial contracting papers along with all of her art in John Moores work it's really a wonderful paper it's incredibly simple and elegantly so it's one of those papers where you say you know that is that is impressively simple and I think that I say that in the best possible page one the first sentence this paper develops a theory of capital structure based on control runs that's it that's it I know what he's doing I know capitals so understanding capital structure is important that's it and the rest of their introduction is basically giving you a feel for how the model works and the key takeaway so what's the what's the message different control rises have into interest instruments such as debt and equity may be just as important in determining financial structures of firms as differences in revenue streams or taxes right Patrick and Philippe came along when people thought of capital structure through the lens of the tax bankruptcy cost trade-off period and they said we'll wait a second that's not necessarily the only reason why we see observe observed heterogeneity in capital structure it could be for reasons associate control rights I mean this is a really important result and with what's new is they distinguish their work not just really from existing capital structure theory but other contracting results such as that done by hard more by Jamie sender and others but it's very simple and it's a page and a half or two page introduction that's it to checking it's short paper but an incredibly important one and then the last one so they share this paper just because this business paper was painful it's kind of like a five-year colonoscopy so right we mark and I started this paper probably you know for and there must have been 50 60 study published studies on the pecking order we were to say we were late to the game would be an understanding and we start we started this project with the idea that well the pecking order is is kind of this rule of thumb about how firms make decisions financing decision I said no one's really modeled that so we're gonna model it with a nested discrete choice model that's how the paper started and then I thought boy that's really cool but who cares who cares and so when we wrote we got dinged at the jaya now we got dinged at the RFS and i thought what's going on here and i realized that we really weren't explaining to readers why what we were doing was new and important there's lots of papers on the pecking order some say it's good some say it's bad some say it works for small firms some say it works for large firms some say it's related to information asymmetry some say it's not related to information asymmetry emblem and then we said a hug there's all these papers they're all saying different things why are they all coming to radically different conclusions about the same theory all of them it was amazing so we completely rewrote the paper and basically the first or second paragraph was fama french say the pecking order works for small terms frank and Goyle safe works for large Soma so says it works for firms with in for facing information asymmetry such as such works for firms not facing either and so there's a clear tension in the literature and the question is was less not only who's right and who's wrong but why are they coming to such different conclusions about the same area and that's how we sold the baby that's how we were able to convince readers that hey actually this is important it's a really important question with a huge literature conflicting evidence and no one knows why so we reconciled that and sort of weighed in on the debate and so it's by no means my most highly cited paper but it's one I was really proud of because we were able to figure out a way to highlight why it was important so let me let me just kind of close things off and there's some good some good books on writing I mean there's a lot of them you know I really love Strunk and white the Elements of Style it's really thin and I don't like to read a lot it's simple scissor I'm writing well as another one and you know it's kind of interesting john cochran has sort of taken up the mantle to make writing a priority he's been doing it for a while now if you check out his website he's actually over at the Hoover Institute at Stanford now he's got a bunch of resources on writing and he also holds a reading group on writing so you might want to check out his website to see what resources he has as well are there any questions about anything yes oh that's a great question so I actually think of a conclusion as I try to avoid repeating what I've said but instead I try to look forward so I trust I try to make claims gently that I really can't make in the intro abstract or body of the paper to open up avenues for future research such as you know this is right you know in my view taking my results and inferences at face value this could have broader implications such as for the allocation of credit among non banks or or economic growth right so things you can't really say based on what you've done but you want to start taking a little bit of leeway and maybe setting an agenda going forward that's one thing that I do but it's usually not made big right so other people use conclusions for different things but just simply regurgitating what you said any other questions or comments yep do we really need so many references was the question ah you know I just wrote a paper with Johan Eli on monthly and I on mom I was mispronouncing bang Oh an asset write an asset pricing paper I think we had 70 references okay why did we do that now that pate was a little bit unique but they were all legitimate reputable people who are related to our page I don't think you need is for any references as you think and if you think putting in references is going to appease of potential reverie you're wrong I think you just need to cite the papers that are directly relevant for your study one thing I would recommend is is that the literature doesn't begin in two thousand go back a lot of what I see that's done actually has its roots in the seventies and eighties take a look at that earlier body of literature I don't think there's a street number you just want to cite the papers that are relevant that's it believe me referees are not shy about saying you should cite such-and-such and I'm not saying it's right but other questions yeah speaking well I would imagine the same best practices apply just presentations do you have any other additional tips yeah I would I would translate these tips into my presentation if you can't clearly convey what you're doing why you're doing it why it's important in the first slide or two people are gonna fall asleep right and so actually I find I learn a lot from presenting how I present the paper and how I write it so I'll write a paper I'll presented rewrite go back and represent and go back and forth because again I try to I think about what I write what am I trying to tell the person sitting across the table from so again get to the point quickly and clearly don't big long lick review slides telling me what everybody's done just flash it I did my due diligence and move on other questions yeah I see you know recommendations to write in the active voice and yet I think most of us still continue to write in the passive voice so what's your take on that so I like to write in the active voice and I'd like to try a lot of people also related to that question a lot a lot of people hey this could maybe plausibly under some circumstances be interpret any right no no no no no no no you're interpreting as this I interpret these results as showing that the allocation of credit to non-bank firms blah blah blah blah whatever it is so be active be confident don't hedge but in the same token think about think about the sentence I flash of David cards paper right while the results are relatively clear cut that's pretty confident there are limitations that's recognizing you know I can only say what I I could only say something in this narrow space so be active and confident that's my opinion that's that's the writing style I try to take it the other thing is ask excuse me I read papers quite differently now I read papers asking these questions and if I can't get the answers really quickly I get frustrated I mean I still have to read the paper but it's part of comments I sent back to people who send me their papers or hey you might want to think about reorganizing things but again everybody has their own voice and everyone has their own style other questions how long do I spend them it depends on what the purposes so I mean it could be could be you know two hours it could be a week yeah did you mean as an editor just reading papers oh yeah yeah oh how much what I'm just reading my papers it depends on the paper some papers are really easy and again when I say really easy that's somewhat of a testament to the author to move through and get the point other papers are a little bit more nuanced I mean I need to think hard about the analysis that they're doing so it just it just varies I wish I wish it were like statistics or econometrics where there are right ways to do things and there are wrong ways to do that but right that's why writing is so part that's why it's so hard but I hope I've convinced you that if you really work hard at it and spend a lot more time thinking about in the process I am Telling You you can only be more successful in terms of your research your publications your presentation whatever it is and if you think about the most successful you know some of the most successful people in our profession most all on every single one but most of all are really great communicators so if there's nothing else I leave you on your own thank you so much