Paper Style Guidelines

For style questions not explicitly addressed here, we will follow whatever the American Economic Review does.

• References to numbered tables, figures, sections, appendixes, and equations should not be capitalized: "See table 3 and equation 4", not "See Table 3 and Equation 4".
• Use the Oxford comma: "apples, pears, and bananas", not "apples, pears and bananas". Part of Ryan dies inside whenever the Oxford comma is missing.
• References in the text
  • No commas before years in parenthetical references: "(Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006)", not "(Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2006)".
  • Use "et al." for references to papers with four or more authors
  • Separate multiple references in parenthetical references with semicolons not commas: "(Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006; Shapiro 2012)" not "(Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006, Shapiro 2012)"
  • No nested parentheses in parenthetical references: "Some authors (e.g., Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010)..." not "Some authors (e.g., Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010))..."
  • Possessive apostrophe before parenthetical reference: "Gentzkow's (2006) approach" not "Gentzkow (2006)'s approach"
  • Verbs apply to the paper, not its authors, and are therefore singular: "Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) shows", not "Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) show".
• For references in bibliography, please use a consistent format. The preferred format is AuthorLast, AuthorFirst, Author2First Author2Last. Year. "Title in Title Caps". Journal VolumeNum(IssueNum): PageBegin-PageEnd.
• Use numerals for numbers >=10 ("increases 10 percentage points") and write out numbers <10 ("increases nine percentage points"). This rule should be broken when necessary to maintain parallelism ("with 3, 12, and 100 observations respectively").
• All figures should be designed so that they are readable in black and white. For instance, do not set a line graph in which there is a blue line, a red line, and a legend. There are at least three options to make such a graph readable in black and white: (1) use colors that are more distinguishable (e.g., black and light blue); (2) make one of the lines dashed or dotted; or (3) instead of the legend, label each line directly on the figure. This last option is typically preferred; see Ryan's "Hotelling Under Pressure" paper for examples.
• Titles of sections and subsections, tables and figures, axis labels, row and column headers in tables, etc. have the only the first word and any propoer nouns capitalized. Do not use "title caps" (e.g., "Log population", not "Log population", and "Main results" not "Main Results").
• The "references" section of the online appendix should include only those references cited in the online appendix but not cited in the body of the paper.
• Ryan prefers the British approach of putting periods and commas outside quotation marks when they should logically be outside (i.e., when they are not part of the quoted text). For example, the text above has "bananas", rather than "bananas,".
• Font should be Times New Roman for everything in the paper, including text in tables and figures
• All text in presentations should use a sans serif font like Calibri or Arial. Serif fonts (e.g., Times New Roman) are difficult for audiences to read.
• The word "data" is plural. So write "the data show", not "the data shows".