Through the Lens of Experience

Dear Young Economists,The best way to grow is to learn from those who have already walked the path. With this in mind, we are launching a new series - a curated collection of articles recommended by professors, professionals, and experts in economics. Each recommendation is an invitation: not just to read, but to think, question, and reflect on the ideas that shape our understanding of the world around us.Economics is not just a discipline- it is a lens. And sometimes, one article at the right moment can shift the way you see everything else. We hope this series offers you exactly that.Our first recommendation comes from Professor Behzod Khoshimov, Assistant Professor of Business, Organizations and Society at NYU Abu Dhabi. And while you are at it - what article changed the way you think?Happy reading! My name is Bekhzod, and I study how investors make decisions -who they fund, when, and why. When asked to suggest papers worth reading, I thought about the ones that shaped how I think about economics in grad school: one from trade, one from IO, and one from my own field -entrepreneurship. These papers are not technically intimidating; they are almost ex-post obvious. But they make you see something familiar in a completely new way.The first is Donaldson (2018), "Railroads of the Raj," American Economic Review.https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20101199The question sounds almost too simple: did building railroads in colonial India help the economy? Of course they did. But Donaldson does something remarkable -he digs up 150-year-old archival data to show exactly how and builds a full trade model to pin down the mechanism. The real magic is the falsification test: he uses over 40,000 km of rail lines that were planned but never built to show his results aren't spurious. The word is that Donaldson won the Clark Medal because of this one paper. It will change how you think about infrastructure, trade, and what serious empirical work looks like.The second is Syverson (2004), "Market Structure and Productivity: A Concrete Example," Journal of Political Economy.https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/424743The title is a pun -he literally studies concrete plants. Why do some firms produce so much more efficiently than others, even within the same industry? His trick: ready-mixed concrete can't travel far before it hardens, so local market density varies purely by geography -not by anything firms did strategically. This gives him clean variation to study how competition shapes productivity, and more importantly, how to think about the relationship between within-industry competition and firm performance.The third is Azoulay, Jones, Kim & Miranda (2020), "Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship," American Economic Review: Insights.https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20180582Everyone knows that great entrepreneurs are young -Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates. Paul Graham once said investors grow skeptical of founders after 32. The data says otherwise. Using administrative records covering virtually all U.S. firms, the authors find that the average founder age among the fastest-growing startups is 45. Not 25. Not 31. Forty-five. The driver? Prior industry experience. The paper does not just overturn a myth, it explains why the myth persists and why the reality is the opposite of what Silicon Valley culture celebrates.Our second recommendation comes from Professor Sergey Popov from Cardiff University.My name is Sergey, I am an applied theorist: I apply theory to economic interactions in uncommon markets and explain things that seem counterintuitive. When I was asked to suggest a singular paper to read, my first reaction was to suggest my own papers, all of them. However, I thought other people deserve their papers to be read too, and I converged to two suggestions. One is purely theoretical that takes economic theory to uncommon decision making, and another is purely empirical that establishes unusual facts.The first is Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1996)https://www.jstor.org/stable/2118204 or you can access via this LinkWhat they study is decisions by juries, and what they ask is whether overcoming 50% is a good barrier. Imagine a courtroom, a defendant, a prosecutor, and a judge. You are one of the jurors. From the deliberations you get a signal about whether the defendant is guilty. Are you going to vote according to your information? What they find is that unanimous decisions, turns out, stimulates people to lie: those who think the defendant is innocent vote that he's guilty! Why? You need to read the paper to grasp it, but even without going deep in the math, you will learn the economics behind this decision. It's an extremely well written paper and very enjoyable to read.The second one is Hamermesh and Biddle (1994)https://www.jstor.org/stable/2117767 or you can access via this Link What they show is that beautiful people are, on average, paid more. Is this surprising? Probably not! But take a look at the paper, and see how they are trying to find the source of this premium - is it because beautiful people are, in general, harder workers? Is that because beauty is an input in the production function? Is that because employers are biased?.. Not surprisingly at all, that one paper generated thousands of follow-up papers. If you want to see how one paper can generate a field, here's one empirical paper that generated a large field of both empirical and theoretical research.In modern days AI wants to summarize papers for you, to save you time. Imagine AI was summarizing art for you, "there is a lady sitting, she's kind of smiling" is not a good substitute for seeing Mona Lisa. Listen to the music to understand music. Dance to understand dance. Read papers to understand papers. These two are just starting points for you. If these two papers seem enjoyable for you, there are plenty more from where these came from.*Please note that all recommendations in this series have been shared with the full agreement and permission of the contributors featured. 

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