Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Guidelines for Writing a Seminar Paper

Seminar for Population Economics

LMU Munich

prepared for the Seminar

The Economics of Long-Run Growth
SoSe 2015
Contents
1 Aim of the paper 1
1.1 Summarizing the assigned paper(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Your own thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Audience of your paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2 Formal Requirements 3
2.1 Layout and length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2 Citations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

3 A Few Words on Academic Writing 3

3.1 A Few Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2 Process of Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

4 Additional Issues 5

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1 Aim of the paper
The aim of your seminar paper is to summarize and discuss a particular aspect of
the general topic of the seminar. Typically, one or two papers will be assigned to
you. These assigned papers usually deal with a research question that is related to
the general topic. The assigned paper(s) should be the basis and subject of your
seminar paper and presentation.
Your seminar paper has to accomplish two goals. First, you need to summarize
the assigned paper(s). This first part should take up approximately 80 percent of
your work. Second, you are required to add your own thoughts to the summary
of the paper. Typically, in this part you place the assigned paper in the context
of the literature and discuss some selected points. In some cases – if you have
the respective idea and time – you may want to add your own empirical exercise
or theoretical extension. This second part of your paper should make up for the
remaining 20 percent of the paper.
Below, you find some guidelines that may help you to prepare and write your
seminar paper. Note that writing a paper always requires individual judgment of
the ideal way how to proceed. Hence, in some cases you may want to disregard parts
of these guidelines. If you do this, you should have thought about it carefully.

1.1 Summarizing the assigned paper(s)

For writing a good seminar paper it is essential that you extract the main points
of the paper assigned to you. Asking yourself the following questions may help to
accomplish this:

• Which research question do the authors tackle?

• Which method do they use to answer their question?

• What are the main steps of the argument? On which empirical or theoretical
assumptions does the argument rest?

• In general: Which parts of the paper are of ultimate importance for the point
the authors make?

Authors typically try to “sell” their paper in the introduction. Reading the intro-
duction carefully (even after having read the whole paper for the first time) helps
you answering the above questions.
When summarizing the paper, you should then focus on explaining the important
parts and disregard the parts of lesser importance. This implies that you have to
summarize the paper in your own words. If your exposition follows the one of
the paper assigned very closely, it is most likely the case that you did not isolate
the important parts successfully. Note that this does not necessarily mean that
you should structure your arguments completely different from the authors of your
assigned paper.
Regardless of how closely you follow the assigned paper, you are required to
mark the arguments that you take from the literature by appropriate citations.

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Remember that plagiarism is severe academic misconduct which leads to failing the
seminar with certainty. Hence, always make sure to cite your sources properly – –
especially when you paraphrase or copy longer parts of papers (which you should
avoid anyway). For more details on how to cite your paper’s sources, see page 3.

1.2 Your own thoughts

In most cases, you will discuss the assigned paper(s) in the context of the literature.
For the most papers, this literature is vast such that it is impossible to survey and
discuss it completely within your allotted time. Hence, it is advisable to focus on a
few main points, which should be understood and discussed in detail. The following
questions may help you to provide an interesting discussion:

• Is the mechanism at work in the paper actually relevant, realistic, crucial? Are
there other mechanisms with similar consequences that may be more impor-
tant?

• For theoretical papers: Are the main assumptions convincing? How are they
related to other approaches?

• For empirical papers: Is the data appropriate for discussing the question at
hand? Is the appropriate estimation method used? What are the assumption
needed for the interpretation of (causal) effects?

For a good discussion, it is not sufficient to merely list a number of potential

strengths and weaknesses. You need to substantiate your argument!
When discussing the paper, keep in mind that the authors always operate un-
der constraints. For theoretical papers, this means that assumptions/simplifications
need to be made in order to think clearly about the issue of interest. When dis-
cussing assumptions, you should thus argue how changing the assumption would
(potentially) change the argument of the paper. For empirical papers, data restric-
tions are often an issue. It is your task to argue whether we can trust the results
given the data presented and whether we would expect different results using addi-
tional data or alternative methods.
Finally, note that your discussion does not necessarily need to be critical (even
though a critique is easier to write than an appraisal). Pointing out strengths in a
substantial way is fine as well.

1.3 Audience of your paper

Your paper is written for your fellow students on the one hand and for the examiners
of the seminar on the other hand. Your paper should be written in such a way that
both audiences can follow your arguments without consulting additional sources.
This means that you can take basic knowledge of the required courses (Microe-
conomics I, Macroeconomics I, Empirical Economics I and Mathematical Methods
for Economics) as given. Everything that goes beyond that knowledge needs to be
explained in detail.

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2 Formal Requirements
Most importantly, you are responsible for handing in your paper in time. The time
for preparation is four weeks. The paper will be assigned by email either by Ms. Fay
or your supervisor. Your paper should also be sent per email to susan.fay@lmu.de
by Noon on the day of your deadline. Late papers will not be accepted. You do not
need to print your paper.
In addition to this, your paper should adhere to the following formal requirements
regarding layout, length, and citation style.

2.1 Layout and length

• Length: A maximum of 30.000 characters (without counting blanks, about 15
pages) without appendix. The appendix may contain formal arguments omit-
ted from the text or additional tables and figures. The appendix should not
contain parts substantial for an (intuitive) understanding of your arguments.

• Fonts: Either use Times- or Arial-Style fonts. When using Times, use 12pt
font size; use 11pt font size for Arial. Section headings should be larger (and
can use different fonts; LateX uses Arial-style for headings and Times for the
main text), and footnotes smaller. In general, your text editor provides useful
default options.

• Spacing: Use one-half spacing.

• Margins : Your text editor usually provides useful default options. This
document uses 3cm left margins and 2cm top, right, and bottom margins.

• Characters per page: As a general rule, your composition of margins, font

type, and font size should yield approximately 2.500 Characters per page,
including blanks.

• Format: Your paper should be sent in as PDF file.

2.2 Citations
It is assumed that you know how to cite properly. For guidance about the appro-
priate way to cite different sources (both in the main text and in the bibliography)
see how authors cite in papers published in major journals (i.e. American Economic
Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, etc.). The only exception
from the rule “cite as people in the major journals do” is that you should refer to
the exact pages from which you took the argument.

3 A Few Words on Academic Writing

Academic writing is hard, because it forces the writer to distill the main parts of
an argument and communicate it to the reader in a clear and effective way. As for

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anything that is hard, numerous guides on writing exist.1 The following points on
the rules and the process of writing have been helpful for the author of this text.
Because everyone is different, they may or may not be helpful for you.
Despite being hard, it is worthwhile to learn to write well. After all, you will in
all likelihood write a lot in your professional life (emails, reports, . . . ). The basic
rules of academic writing usually apply to other professional forms of writing as well.

3.1 A Few Rules

The most important accomplishment in writing your paper is to figure out what the
main point of your work is and to communicate this point in a concise way. This
holds for every level of organization: the entire paper, a section, a subsection, a
paragraph, etc. When writing – and when reading what you have written – always
ask yourself: What is the point I want to make with this paragraph (or this section,
this paper)? Try to formulate this point in the first or at least the second sentence
of the paragraph. For example, if you are explaining what a utility function is (after
having introduced preference orderings) start with: “Given the preferences of an
individual, a utility function u(c) assigns a value to each consumption c bundle such
that u(c) retains the preference ordering of the individual, That is, if the individual
prefers bundle c to bundle c0 , it holds that u(c) > u(c0 )”. Then, you may proceed to
explain more specific properties of the utility function (e.g. ordinality) further down
the paragraph.
Use as easy and as direct language as possible.
Make sure that at any point in the paper, the reader can understand what
you are saying based on what you have written before. You have to decide which
point/argument has to be made where. Frequent previews and recalls are a sign of
poor organization. Given this, you obviously do not need to explain something for
which you can safely assume that your audience knows it.
Keep it short. In an ideal world, every word counts. For starters, it suffices if
every sentence actually says something. If you can cut a sentence in two part, it
is usually a good idea to do so. Also, avoid repetition (however, if you think the
reader needs a short reminder, give her one).
Be your toughest critic. Could you understand what you have written if you
would read it for the first time? Is your language and spelling appropriate (especially
when writing in a foreign language)? Use the seminar paper to improve your writing.
This usually means that you have to do a lot of revising. Keep in mind that with
each instance of revsing and rewriting, you usually improve your work by a lot!

3.2 Process of Writing

Start with studying your assigned reading carefully. Read them multiple times,
focusing on the parts you have not understood the previous time. After each reading,
try to distill the most important results. Which figures, tables, or theorems explain
the main part of the story? Usually, you want to include these in your paper.
1
See, for example, John Cochrane’s Writing Tips for PhD Students or William Strunk Jr. and
E.B. White’s famous little book “The Elements of Style”.

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 Start writing early on. I usually begin with an outline, and for a seminar paper
this is certainly a good idea to do so. Add content to your outline. Write down, for
every section, the order of your arguments. (These bullet points often make good
starting points for paragraphs later.) Also, add the main figures, tables, or theorems
identified earlier to the outline and explain them thorougly.
You should have an extensive outline (a few pages) for at least the summary
part of your paper between one and two weeks after receiving your assignment. You
should have discussed your outline with your supervisor by the end of week two (the
latest!). You have to contact your supervisor to discuss your results with her or him
(meaning they will not contact you).
Begin writing your paper early, the latest to weeks after receiving your assign-
ment. First, focus on the summary part of your work. You will most likely get ideas
for the discussion part in the process writing and thinking about your main papers.
Do not be afraid to change plans (e.g. to deviate from your outline) when you
have the feeling that it will improve your work. Remember that everything but
the paper you submit is preliminary work where you can experiment with different
approaches.
Always keep your time constraint in mind. Ideally, you’ll have your first draft
ready a few days before your deadline. This allows you to revise your paper several
times.
The most important part of your paper is the introduction. It should motivate
the main research question and give a concise summary of what you are going to
do in the remainder of your paper, Write the introduction first and rewrite it after
each draft.
Good luck!

4 Additional Issues
Always keep in mind that the time for preparing your paper is very short. Do not
waste time on minor points (especially not in the beginning when starting to work).
Set yourself deadlines for completing specific tasks (and adhere to the deadline).
Start organizing your thoughts immediately. Before reading additional papers, ask
yourself which points you expect to find there – and stop reading, when it becomes
clear that the paper is not related to your work.
You may want to invest some of your time, however, in learning and using pro-
fessional text editing software. LateX2 – once specified accordingly – automatically
takes care of the layout and, when used in combination with bibtex or biblatex (the
use of either one is highly recommended!), automatically generates your bibliogra-
phy.3 If you are not used to writing text in an editor and nevertheless want to enjoy
Latex’s layout capabilities, you may want to try LyX or Scientific Word/Workplace.
If you do not want to invest in either Scientific Word, LyX or LateX, you should
learn the automatic bibliography capabilities of Word or Open Office.
2
For Windows: Miktex. A useful (and cheap) editor is WinEdt.
3
To facilitate starting with LateX, the LateX file of this document is available on the website
of the chair.

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 Finally, for organizing your literature it is advisable to use appropriate software
like Jabref (open source), Citavi4 , or newer, cloud-based programs like Zotero (open
source) or Mendeley. Note that using this software only makes sense if you use some
sort of automated bibliography (either in LateX/LyX or Word/Open Office).

4
Citavi is provided free of charge from the university library.