ECON 325 – Industrial Organization and Public Policy How to summarize an article Group Exercise

Consider the article “Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football” In two or three sentences, describe the article’s main point. What is it that Prof. Romer is setting out to do in this study? There are two problems you need to confront when you do this – the first is figuring out what to say, and the second is figuring out how to say it. Your goal here is to produce a short paragraph in your own words that is as accurate and jargon-free as possible.

 

2.       Next, exchange your response with your two group mates, and come up with a consensus summary of the article’s main point.

 

3.       Your next step is (as a group) to write a page or so describing how Prof. Romer goes about answering the question he has set out to answer. Your job here will be to describe the techniques he used, including the problems he encountered and how he resolves them. Hint #1: Remember who your audience is – you’re writing this summary to refer to later so that you don’t have to re-read the entire article when you want to describe what it says in your paper. Hint #2: Prof. Romer probably used techniques and tools with which you are not familiar. In writing your description of his techniques, you will have to do the best you can, and figure out what else you’d need to know to understand the techniques completely.

 

4.       Finally, you need to point out shortcomings of Prof. Romer’s work (every published paper has shortcomings) and describe how the work could be extended. If you look carefully, you will see that Prof. Romer admits (and tries to overcome) some of the shortcomings of his research. How well has he done at this? What additional problems do you see in this article, and how would you fix them? As a group, talk about the shortcomings you noticed, and how you might extend the research on this question.

 

5.       Come up with a short (one to three sentence) conclusion for your summary.

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