The Key to Research Ideas

Lately, I’ve seen both on twitter and in my personal conversations with students questions about how to get started in research. There are a host of skills you need to develop, but I want to focus on what it takes to generate research ideas.

I’ll start with the origin story of my dissertation. I’m sitting in Haiti, working for a microfinance organization, reading a book about Haiti’s history. I had picked the book because I was spending about two months in the country, and I thought it would be fun to learn more about the history. I had read several accounts of the Haitian revolution, but I knew nothing about Haiti between 1804 and 1950.

As I get into the post-revolution period, I read about Haiti’s unique land institutions. Families divided plots each generation, and selling them was nearly impossible. This jumped out at me like the villain in a bad horror movie. This sounded like an awful institution for economic growth. I wanted to know if there was a way to confirm that.

That question drove my dissertation. And now it’s published in the Journal of Economic History.

The key lesson here is that I did not come up with a research idea just sitting and thinking about good research ideas. You can’t create research ideas out of nothing. You need inputs.

Inputs include history books, theory, news, and other research papers on a topic that interests you. Inputs could be traveling or volunteering. I have a friend who was on the brink of quitting his PhD and decided to take a break by volunteering for a non-profit in India. He came back with a research idea that not only became his dissertation, it got him a job at one of the world's best schools and got his paper published in the best economics journal. You can’t create research ideas if you don’t give yourself something to start from.

You can see this in what I’m working on now. I’m writing a paper on the effect of political instability on foreign investment. The paper came directly out of my work on Haiti’s land institutions. While I was collecting data for my dissertation, I discovered notices for foreign businesses operating in Haiti. I disregarded the first one I saw, but then I saw another and kept it. As I searched for my land data, I kept crossing the license data, and I saved each list I found. I realized the licenses covered an interesting period in Haiti’s history, so I decided to intentionally collect the data instead of just casually collecting it. Just like reading the book on Haiti’s history, the idea came as I was searching for something else. But it didn’t come out of the air. It came because I was feeding myself good inputs.

If you want to create good research ideas, start reading books on the topics that interest you. The more you give yourself good inputs, the more you’ll find something to explore.

I have an idea for an input below, but first, there’s a new video!

The Unnamed Nobel Winner

Last week, we celebrated the accomplishments of David Card, Josh Angrist, and Guido Imbens. But there was an unnamed winner. Everyone, including the Nobel committee, know this economist would have won the prize too. But he was omitted.

So I made a video recognizing him and the work he did. Go check it out on YouTube!

Possible Inputs

The news is a good input. That’s how I came up with my paper on smartphones and child injuries. I was reading the Wall Street Journal and an article mentioned that smartphones might be distracting parents, and their kids might be getting hurt as a result. As a young parent, this was interesting to me, and I had an idea on how to test it. It took some work, but eventually it was published in a great journal. But I never would have had that idea without reading the news.

So let me put in a plug for The Daily Upside. They worked with me on this week’s video, and in full disclosure they are paying me for people signing up for their newsletter with my link. But the newsletter is free, so think of it as a way to support the channel!

The Daily Upside is a daily newsletter that covers events in economics and business. As I was writing this, today’s edition came in, and the stories included how Apple’s recent business moves have affected its advertising revenue (great inspiration for an industrial organization research idea), how U.S. consumers are holding onto their cash (macroeconomics or public economics idea), and how Squid Games is worth $900 million to Netflix (probably some research idea there, but mostly just a staggering number).

If you want a regular input to help generate research ideas, check out The Daily Upside. And it helps the channel!