E42 - Pitch Perfect: The basics of making a great pitch with Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Zach Bethune

The Hidden Curriculum

This week we have a special episode! We invite a couple of job market candidates to give us their pitch and we have a panel of judges identifying the great things about each pitch and broad lessons for everyone who is crafting the pitch for their paper. The "elevator" pitch is an idea whose objective is to talk about a particular paper to motivate a conversation. Usually job market candidates have to "craft" a pitch since they'll be constantly asked about their job market paper. It is not easy and there are many takes on how to get this done, this is why in this episode we have the hot takes from two professors. Our first panelist is Mary Eschelbach Hansen, she is a professor of economics at American University. Our second panelist is Zach Bethune, an associate professor of economics at Rice University. We have four candidates who have share their pitches with us:

Laura Montenovo a PhD student at Indiana University. Job Market paper

Alistair Macaulay a postdoc at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. Job Market Paper

James Flynn a PhD student at UC Boulder. Job Market Paper

Ashley Bradford a PhD student at Indiana University. Job Market Paper.

We hope this is useful to both JMCs and early career scholars honing their skills on marketing a paper.

Sebastian Tello-Trillo is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy in the University of Virginia.

Alex Hollingsworth is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs in Indiana University.

Recs of the week:

Check out Mary Eschelbach Hansen's book Bankrupt in America (with Bradley A. Hansen). This book traces how and why bankruptcy was transformed from an infrequently used provision in the Constitution, to an indispensable tool for businesses, to a central element of the social safety net for ordinary Americans— all in less than a century.

Mary recommends for you to check out the pumpkin pie with bourbon recipe from Julia Childs, I think is this one. In addition, listen a Johnny Cash song! Here is a playlist of his work

Zach recommends to unplug from your phone and to do something else, maybe read a physical book! He recommends The Infinite Machine, by Camila Russo. You can find all the recommended books on our recommended book page https://bookshop.org/shop/Hiddencurriculum. Also check out Zach's research on his research page and his food rec is to order a Greenberg Smoked Turkey.

Alex recommends the book When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein.