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发信人: kuangshui ((▄︻┻┳═一)), 信区: Postgraduate
标题: How to Build an Economic Model in Spare Time 7
发信站: 荔园晨风BBS站 (Sat Mar 25 23:10:11 2006), 站内

7. Searching the literature

At this point you can start doing your literature search. Tell your
professors about what you've discovered---nine times out of ten they'll tell
you to look in the ``1983 AER'' or ``Econometrica 77'' or some textbook
(maybe even one of mine). And lots of the time they'll be right. You'll look
there and find ``your'' model---but it will be much better done, much more
fully developed, and much clearer.

Hey, no one said research would be easy. But this is a point where you
really have a chance to learn something---read the article(s) carefully
and ask yourself ``Why didn't I do that?'' If someone started with the same
idea as you and carried it further, you want to see what you missed.

On the other hand, if you really followed the advice I gave you above to
keep it simple, you may have come up with something that is much clearer
than the current treatments. Or, maybe you've found something that is more
general.

If so, you may have a worthwhile insight. Go back to your advisor and tell
him or her what you have found. Maybe you've got a new angle on an old idea
that is worth further exploration. If so, congratulations---you would never
have found this if you did the literature search right away.

Maybe what you've figured out is not already in the literature. The next
possibility is that you are wrong. Maybe your analysis isn't right, maybe the
idea is just off the wall. This is where your advisor can play a big role.
If you've really made your analysis as simple as possible, it is a) less
likely to contain an error, and b) any errors that remain
will be easier to find.

This brings me to another common problem. When you've worked on a topic for
several months---or even several weeks---you tend to lose a lot of perspective
literally. You're just too close to the work to really get a picture of what
is going on. This lack of perspective takes one of two forms: first, you may
think something is obvious when it really isn't. It may be obvious to you,
but you've been thinking about this issue for several months---it probably
isn't so obvious to someone who doesn't have the benefit of that experience.

The other possibility is that you may think something is complicated when it

Maybe there's a nice clear trail just a few feet away that you've totally
missed. So at this point you've got to start getting some independent
judgment of your work. Talk to your advisor, talk to your fellow students,
talk to your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, neighbor, or pet: : :
whoever you can get to listen.

And here's what you'll find: they've got no idea of what you are talking
about (especially your pet). So you have to go back to trying to figure out
what you really are talking about:
what is the fundamental idea of your model?

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又一村102

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