After coediting AER: Insights for about eight months, I wanted to share some hopefully useful information about this awesome journal & short papers in general. AER:I is now in its sixth year of existence. It grew out of AER’s short papers section and aims to publish papers that are of the same quality and importance as AER but succinct.

A few random bits of advice about how to write those pesky literature contribution paragraphs. 1. Refrain from summarizing other papers for the sake of summarizing them. Keep the attention on yours. Don't write "Z et al (2023) do A and find B, but I do X." Try "Unlike Z et al. (2023), I do X." Keep asking yourself "Does the reader need to know this?"

Spent the last few days emailing thousands of academics in Russia. Today, I'm publishing one of the replies I've gotten as a blog post (in English and in Russian, with the author's permission). Please read it to understand what's going on inside Russia. deryugina.com/a-view-from-ru… Most of the academics do not reply, maybe because I didn't ask for a reply. But I did get replies ranging from calling me an "American rag" to telling me what the REAL situation is to saying the person is doing all I suggested to apologizing for Russia and many in between.

Are you of Eastern European descent and on 23andme.com? Here’s another way to reach those in Russia and urge them to do something to stop this war. #StopPutinNOW Go on 23andme.com and turn on DNA sharing if you haven't already. Look for suggested relatives with Russian-sounding names (under ANCESTORS-->DNA Relatives). Message them. Your message will be uniquely meaningful because you ARE related to them, even if distantly.

I don't consider myself a sentimental personal, but today I'm thinking about the Ukrainian national anthem. English translation below. Ukraine is not yet dead, nor it's glory and freedom,
Luck will still smile on us brother-Ukrainians.
Our enemies will die, as the dew does in the sunshine,
And we, too, brothers, we'll live happily in our land.

There are many reasons to feel sad and scared. But the past five days have also made me have more faith in humanity than I have in a really long time. The Ukrainians who are fighting for their independence and their lives. The people who have stepped up to raise money and awareness. The world leaders who have realized the gravity of the threat and continue to escalate sanctions on Russia.

I was going to do a thread about how Putin is successfully controlling the reaction of the Russian population but then it grew into a blog post. Highlights below.
deryugina.com/how-to-control… Russia’s government wields a carrot and a stick. The carrot is that Russia is always the good guy in the mainstream media. And who doesn't want to be the good guy?

A few people who have reached out to me since the war in Ukraine started seemed surprised to hear that most of my relatives there are spending their nights hiding in basements (and not the nice finished kinds we have in the US) or underground parking lots. So I wanted to clarify. My relatives are in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Kiev. They are surrounded by war. They are scared for their lives. Luckily, none of them has been physically harmed yet, and they can still buy food, but that's about all they can do.

Some miscellaneous writing advice, especially for those writing up their JMP right now.

1. Completing a solid draft will take a lot longer than you think. Plan accordingly (i.e., spend as much of your research time writing as possible). 2. Ask your letter writers NOW when they want a polished draft for letter purposes and plan accordingly. Don't give them a half-finished (or 3/4 finished) paper; it will hurt your letter quality.

We are crowdsourcing existing paper summaries for our social science wiki. Contribute yours and spread the word to help us get more!

All you need to do is (anonymously) paste a summary you have lying around into this form: forms.gle/hbj9RUiXfGPLky… What kind of paper summaries might you have lying around? Ones you wrote for a referee report, for a literature review, for field exams, for a class, or for a new research project, among others.

No summary is too long or too short.

A new blog post with some basic guidelines for how to conduct robustness analysis in quasi-experimental empirical work (+ some general tips).

deryugina.com/some-tips-for-…

#EconTwitter Overarching principle: think first. Do not try every possible permutation of samples/fixed effects, etc. Think about what concerns readers might have & design robustness checks to address those.

The current COVID-19 situation reminds me in many ways of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005. I've studied the latter disaster in my research, and I think we can learn a lot from it. Summary follows, full post is here: medium.com/@tatyana_57116… Both COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina are large external shocks that have nothing to do with overvalued housing markets, excessive leverage, or a sudden drop in consumer confidence. Let me tell you more about Hurricane Katrina.

Some general paper-writing advice for students who are going on the job market next year (though this advice can be applied to any paper).

(No, it's NOT too early to be writing up your JMP!) First and foremost, writing up your research results is difficult. Thus, prepare to spend a lot of time on it and do not worry if it is going slowly. If writing seems easy to you, you are either a prose genius or doing it wrong.