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By default, I exclude econometrics. Just count how many econometrics Nobel Prize in the past, but if you want to stick to those trivial details, I just want to say again that econometrics is excluded in the discussion and I am not going to mention this again.
By insight, what I mean is thoughts of truly ingenuity that nobody else in the past have ever thought about it and this both questions our usual intuition or our understanding of economics and spurs a new field of economic research. Arrow's result is insightful because it challenges the way we think and it is EXACTLY because interpretation of it that triggers a new field of research and numerous follow-up papers. If you just treat any result LITERALLY as what the theorem states, then I have nothing else to say. You can say with the same logic that first and second welfare theorems are just theorems and interpretations of them don't count as insights. However, it is the striking interpretations of the welfare theorems that lead to the school of free-market economics. If you just take the theorem LITERALLY, they are just two theorems. Some technical papers are exactly what you have mentioned, with nice technique-generated theorems but no interpretation that would lead to big economic insight. I am not familiar with Sannikov's work but if his work is purely introduce a methodology that solves the continuous time principal-agent problem, then this paper is of limited insight compared with the original discrete time or even single period principal-agent models. Lucas always says, you need to justify why you use dynamic models. if dynamic models do not provide any additional economic insight beyond static models, why bother use it? So I believe Sannikov's work must have something additional beyond methodology, i.e., it must be that there is economics in his paper, not merely mathematics.
Give a nice summary of your work is necessary but not sufficient condition to get good fly outs and it is not limited to AEA/AFA conference but to your fly outs, to your 30-minute talk with faculty members. Even in your 90-minute presentation, to be honest, most people will just focus for 10-15 minutes and then they will not be that focused. That's not what I have said, but a big name person's word. Therefore, you need to summarize your work nicely in the first 10-15 minutes, show people what is the economics in your paper, why is it important and interesting and how does it help us better understand the ECONOMICS not the MATHEMATICS. You need solid models to support your summary, but if you cannot say explicitly in the first couple of minutes what is your ECONOMIC contribution, your model can be very beautiful and technical but you are not going to get a good chance of impressing the audience.
Before I mention econometrics, you never exclude that field in your argument(and you continuous arguments like ALL nobel price thoery, which with no doubt include many econometrics theory), I don't know how could you state "you never change", maybe you have different definition of economics in your mind, but that is absolutely not a common knowledge. Please give me a clear definition of "insight". If insight, as you argued in the Arrow's case, is just a statement of a theorem, then almost every technical paper can also get some plain and short statement, like "continuous time contract behaves similar to static contract but with existing time", is that a economic insight, or a result? You don't need to tell me that "transitivity is non trivial", it is interpretation of and what we learn from the result, not the economics insight(or you have a somewhat different definition of insight). Thanks for your AEA/AFA case, but there are plenty of alternative theory to explain it. For a school which may interview 30-40 people in 2 days, the most efficient way is a short interview to ruled out most of those interviewees, and then investigate those candidates in flyout. I assume you have attended many job talks, and I assume you may have seen many cases that some candidate with very promising abstract(or first 5 minutes presentation), and states a very interesting result but end up with dull and trivial logic. These cases happened again again and again simply because people usually only states the interesting result and very general idea(like coordination problem, or market friction) in the interview, which make people have no clue to really judge their paper. Those papers often have a quite interesting title or result, but is in fact trivial or with ridiculous assumptions, they appears "insightful" in first 1 or 2 minutes. -- by 会员 moontroy (2011/3/30 0:55:29)
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