So you want to do a PhD?
Here is a brief extract of comments I made in an interview in Singapore this year. The first piece of advice I give to PhD students is to not be in a big rush to get the data and do something with it. You have to have a really good question first. Otherwise, no matter how good your data is, your work is not going to be interesting and you will not publish a good paper. The second thing is, you should always theoretically analyse the question completely first because that exercise will take you to the right empirical specification for the data work that you want to do. There should be a good theory because once you have a theory, then you can derive a setup that tells you that if this assumption holds, then you should see this in the data, etc. “No theory, no paper.” Another piece of advice is not to be in a big rush to find a topic because you are going to be stuck with it for the duration of the PhD and possibly a few more years. You do not want sub-optimally close on something tha...