Play · Game
The Reading
You sit in a graduate seminar. The room is quiet. You are handed an excerpt from a paper everyone in modern economics is supposed to know — Card’s minimum-wage natural experiment, Angrist and Krueger’s quarter-of-birth IV, Acemoglu–Johnson–Robinson on colonial origins, Banerjee–Duflo on microfinance, the Reinhart–Rogoff debt-and-growth correction. Read carefully. For each paper, three questions: what’s the identification strategy, what’s the headline finding, and what would most strongly threaten the result.
A round is three randomly drawn papers, nine questions total. Score is correct out of nine. The excerpts are short paraphrases in our own words — go and read the originals afterwards.
Round format
3 papers · 9 questions
Drawn at random from 10 canonical papers across labour, development, finance, macro and public economics.
In the deck
Ten famous papers. You’ll see three of them this round.
- Labour
David Card & Alan Krueger (1994)
Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania
American Economic Review
- Labour
Joshua Angrist & Alan Krueger (1991)
Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?
Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Development
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson & James Robinson (2001)
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
American Economic Review
- Development
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster & Cynthia Kinnan (2015)
The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomised Evaluation
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics
- Macro
Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff (2010)
Growth in a Time of Debt
American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings)
- Labour
David Card (1990)
The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market
Industrial and Labor Relations Review
- Growth
Paul Romer (1986)
Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth
Journal of Political Economy
- Public Econ
Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline & Emmanuel Saez (2014)
Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Development
Edward Miguel & Michael Kremer (2004)
Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities
Econometrica
- Labour
Claudia Goldin (2014)
A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter
American Economic Review