Jacob Moscona谈JMP创作心得 Jacob Moscona on Their Job Market Paper
本文最初于 2023 年 7 月 13 日 发布于微信公众号 Impactful Research；2026 年 4 月 28 日 同步至本网站。
Originally published on the WeChat official account Impactful Research on 2023-07-13; mirrored to this website on 2026-04-28.
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从上个找工作的季节开始，我们开辟了一个新的专题，采访那些过去几年中市场上冉冉升起的新星，听他们分享一篇有影响力的“就业市场论文”背后的故事。
这个专题的第七篇文章，我们邀请到Jacob Moscona分享他的job market paper的创作历程和对青年学者及博士生的建议。Jacob Moscona目前是哈佛大学经济学、历史学与政治学的奖学金获得者，同时在麻省理工学院扶贫行动实验室（J-PAL）担任博士后，他的job market paper “Inappropriate Technology: Evidence from Global Agriculture” 研究了技术的不适当转移对全球创新、技术扩散和生产力的影响，为不适当技术假说的每个支柱提供了支持，并阐释了创新方向如何成为全球农业生产率差异的起因。
Jacob Moscona主要从事发展经济学、环境经济学和创新经济学的研究。他的其他论文研究了创新如何应对气候变化和农业，撒哈拉以南非洲的血统组织和冲突，以及国家能力与创新问题。
以下是Jacob Moscona分享关于Inappropriate Technology: Evidence from Global Agriculture 这篇文章的创作历程。
#本期访谈主要问题
1. 你是怎样发现这一研究问题的？
2. 在这篇就业市场论文的写作与修改过程中，最大的挑战是什么？
3. 人们能在五大期刊上发表的主要原因是什么？
4. 使这篇论文成为有影响力研究的主要原因是什么？
5. 对年轻学者有何建议？
Q1：你是怎样发现这一研究问题的？之前有过其它尝试吗？
Q1:How did you find the research idea? Any other trials before seizing this idea?
这源于我和Karthik Sastry合作的另一篇文章，那篇文章以美国农业为研究对象，研究创新如何应对气候变化。我们发现新技术的发展是为了应对破坏性气候，并在减弱气候变化对美国经济的影响方面发挥了重要作用。而当写完那篇文章时，我们不禁联想到世界上的其他地区：因为我们目前的分析都只集中在美国，至于这一影响在别的国家是什么样的，我们尚未明悉。
It came out of a different paper with the same co-author, Karthik Sastry. We wrote a paper about how innovation reacts to climate change focusing on the US agriculture. We show that new technology has gotten developed in response to the pattern of climate damage and US agriculture, and has played a major role in limiting or reducing the economic impact of climate change in the US. But when we finished writing that paper, we thought what about the rest of the world, because all this analysis is focused on the US, it’s not clear what this means for other countries.
一方面，为美国的农业而开发的、用来对抗气候变化的技术可能也会帮助到世界其他地区：这些技术会在世界各地传播，从而帮助世界适应气候变化。但另一方面，也许这些为美国设计的技术只会在美国有用，到了别的地方便失效了，因此世界其他地方仍然无法应用这些新技术来适应气候变化。在思考这个问题的时候，我们想到了关于适当和不适当技术的文献，即一种技术只能在某些地区发挥作用的情况，还有便是这对于全球生产力差异的影响。
On the one hand, the technology that gets developed for US agriculture to fight climate change might help the rest of the world. The technologies flow around the world and help the whole world adapt to climate change. But on the other hand, maybe the technology designed for the US only helps the US, they only really work well in the US, and the rest of the world is still not able to adapt to climate change using new technology. When thinking about that idea, we became aware of this whole literature on appropriate and inappropriate technology, the idea that technology works well in some places and not others, and how that matters for global productivity differences.
我们对这个话题十分感兴趣，所以我们决定写一篇文章，不仅着眼于气候变化，还要在农业的背景下探讨这个话题。
Then we got so interested in the topic that we decided to write a paper, not only focused on climate change, (but also) about this whole topic in the context of agriculture.
接着我们开始思考：我们要如何衡量我们关心的研究对象？我们如何衡量和解释“（技术）不适当的程度”？我们如何测度世界各地的技术扩散？我们如何测度生产力？慢慢地，这些思考最终发展成为我们的论文。我们还没有真正回答关于气候适应的问题，希望我们能在未来的文章中研究这个。这就是这篇文章的开始，它起初是关于气候适应及其相关技术的思考，后来我们对这类话题都有了兴趣。
Then we started thinking about, how do we measure all of this? How do we measure inappropriateness? What does that mean? How do we measure technology diffusion around the world? How do we measure productivity? And it grew into the paper that we ended up writing. And we still haven’t actually answered the question about climate adaptation. Hopefully we’ll do that in the future paper. That’s how we started, it was thinking about climate adaptation and technology for climate adaptation, and then we got interested in this whole set of topics.
Q2：在这篇就业市场论文的写作与修改过程中，最大的挑战是什么？
Q2:What was the greatest challenge during the writing of the paper (as a job market paper)?
对我们来说，最大的挑战是找到一个将经济理论和数据估计联系起来的最佳方式。我希望当我们写下这个理论的时候它描述了这个世界是如何运行的，我们想要确保我们以一种与理论一致的方式来估计（模型需要吻合数据的矩条件，也需要符合现实），这样它就会捕捉到我们想要的结果。
For us, the biggest challenge was figuring out the best way of linking the economic theory and the data estimation. I’m kind of convincing ourselves that when we wrote down the theory that it was actually capturing how the world works. We wanted to make sure that we were estimating things in a way that was consistent with the theory (the model should be consistent with the moment condition of data, as well as the reality), and that captures what we wanted to capture.
我们反复考虑了很久。我考虑用回归来分析问题，我们如何解决它，我们如何回过头来启示理论，以及如何真正让理论和数据在讲述故事时相得益彰。我认为那是最难的部分。我认为当我们开始写这篇论文的时候，我们自己对想要回答的问题有一个非常清晰的思路，但是真正到了用理论、数据，还有两者的交互来讲好故事时，发现还是很有挑战性的。
It was a lot of going back and forth. I’m thinking about regression, to run the issues with every regression, how we can fix it, how we can then turn back and inform the theory, and how to really tell the story as a dialogue between theory and data. I think that was the hardest part. When we started out the paper, we had a pretty clear idea of the question we wanted to answer at some high-level words, but telling that story using theory, data, and dialogue between the two was challenging.
Q3：人们能在五大期刊上发表的主要原因是什么？
Q3:What are the main reasons that people can publish on big five journals?
我们的文章尚未发表，希望我们能如意。我感觉每次写完一篇文章并设法让编辑喜欢它就像是在攀登一座陌生的山峰。每次都很不容易，有各种各样的挑战。每一份成功都让人觉得这是一个奇迹。所以我并不认为这存在什么定式。我猜（能让我们的文章有机会发表的）一个原因是我们所关注的话题还没有进行过太多的研究。相关研究也不是没有，但没有使用和我们一样的数据，也并非着眼于我们关心的话题。
Knock on wood. The paper is not published yet. It feels like every time you write a paper and manage to get an editor to like it is like climbing a different mountain. It’s all different. Every time is really hard. There are different types of challenges every time, and it’s like a miracle every time that it happens. So, I don’t think there’s any formula. I think one reason is that the topic that we’re focusing on hasn’t been one that there’s been that much research on yet. There has been research on it, but not using data in the same way that we’re using and not focusing on the topic that we’re focusing on.
还有一点是，你要能够研究一些让人感觉新颖独特的东西，并且你要能说服人们这东西是重要的。通过你的结论和你写文章的方式，你可以说服读者，说这是一个大家都想要去了解的、十分重要的、新颖且激动人心的事物。虽然我们在理解方面取得了进展，但因为还有很多工作没做，所以现有的理解还十分有限。我觉得这是一个原因。
Then an important thing is to be able to study something that is very new and different, but you can convince people that is still important. Through your results and through the way you’ve written the paper, you can convince them that this is a really important, new and exciting thing that people should want to understand. And we make progress toward understanding, but there hasn’t been much work on, and the existing understanding is pretty limited. I think that was a lot of it.
另外，尽量让自己更有说服力，要确保你所有的结论和结果都是经过深思熟虑和细心关注的，是严谨的。
And then try to be as convincing as possible. Once you have that, you still have to be really convincing and make sure that all of your conclusions and results are backed up by a lot of thought and care and rigor.
Q4：使这篇论文成为有影响力研究的主要原因是什么？
Q4:What are the main reasons that make this paper to be impactful research?
应该是这篇文章有一些特质，这些特质恰好是编辑们在决定一篇文章是否应该发表在期刊上时所关注的。这篇文章回答了一个对很多人来说都很重要的大问题，并找到了令人信服的答案。
Those should be some of the same characteristics that editors are looking for when deciding if they should be in journals. The paper answers a big and important question that matters to a lot of people and finds convincing answers to that question.
对我们来说，论文的细节非常重要。很多关于创新和技术扩散的研究，也就是我们论文研究的东西，都将创新的数量或技术扩散的数量作为结果变量。但我们真的想对此说：“不。”的确，我们关心创新，我们关心技术扩散，但归根结底，我们只关心它对生产力的影响。我们真正关心的是生产力。在这篇论文中，我们想要让读者相信，我们所讨论的一切不仅对解释技术很重要，而且对解释实际的生产力也很重要。
For us, it was really important, in terms of the details of the paper. A lot of work on innovation and technology diffusion, which is what our papers about, uses the amount of innovation or the amount of technology diffusion as outcome variables. But we really wanted to say, no. Yes, we care about innovation, we care about technology diffusion. But at the end of the day, we only really care about that in so far as it affects productivity. What we really care about is productivity. In this paper, we really wanted to make sure that we were convincing or convince the reader that everything we were talking about mattered not only for explaining technology, but also for explaining actual productivity.
这是我们认为很重要的一点。然后在实证分析和反事实的背景下，我们花很多时间讨论它为什么重要，比如为什么我们的结果对于解释当今世界上众所周知的正在发生的全球趋势很重要。每个人都知道气候变化正在发生。每个人都知道创新的分布非常不平衡，而且集中在某些地方，但随着中国和印度等新兴国家的崛起，这种情况每天都在变化。我们在论文的最后花了很多时间讨论我们的结果如何帮助人们理解这些重大变化的影响。
That’s one thing that we thought was important. And then spending a lot of time discussing both in the context of the empirical analysis, and in the context of counterfactual, why it matters, like why our results are important for interpreting ongoing trends around the world today that everybody knows about. Everybody knows that climate change is happening. Everybody knows that the distribution of innovation is very skewed and concentrated in some places, but that it’s changing every day, as new countries like China and India are rising. We spent a lot of time at the end of the paper talking about how our results can help people understand what the impact of those big changes are.
Q5：您对于青年学者创作有影响力的高质量研究有什么建议？
Q5:Do you have any advice for junior scholars on how to produce impactful high quality research?
我并不觉得我有资格给出任何建议。我希望得到建议。但就我来说，当我在攻读博士学位时，一件非常重要的事情就是尝试在每个步骤中都找一些乐趣 ，我认为我非常幸运有一群很好的同学，在博士项目中遇到了不少很好的人，还有一些很好的老师和博士后，等等。我们一起过得非常开心。
I don’t feel like I’m in a position to give any suggestions yet. I need suggestions. But for me, when I was in the PhD, one really important thing was having a lot of or trying to have a lot of fun at every step. I was lucky to have some great classmates, some great other people in the PhD program, some great faculty and post-docs who are around, and other people in the environment. We had a lot of fun together.
一些最好的想法和一些最好的研究源于你对它的享受、努力思考、与朋友的辩论、和持续到深夜的工作，但这不是因为工作辛苦，而是因为你想知道答案，因为你乐在其中。
Some of the best ideas and some of the best research came out of enjoying it, thinking hard, debating it with friends, and working late into the night, not because it’s hard work, but because you’re just having so much fun and you want to know the answer.
总之，我认为最重要的是找到真正享受过程中不同阶段的方法，并与其他人一起做。但这并不会总发生。有些地方非常具有挑战性，有些日子真的很艰难，有些事情即便很无聊、很难，或者需要花费很多时间，还很烦人，你也还是不得不去做。但我认为从长远来看，享受乐趣是非常重要的 。另一件重要的事情是抓住机会接触新的想法，像是读很多不同的书，到很多不同的地方旅行，包括读经济学以外的书，与经济学这个领域以外的学者们交流，尽可能多地了解世界的观点，因为这可以为你的研究提供信息，帮助你回答问题，找到有趣的研究对象，但是现在的经济学家鲜有关注到这一点。
It’s the most important thing to find ways of really enjoying the different steps of the process and doing it with other people. And that’s not always possible. There are aspects that are really challenging. There are days that are really hard. And there are things that you have to do that are boring or hard or take a lot of time and are annoying. But in the long run, having fun is really important. The other thing that was important for me is to take the opportunities to expose myself to new ideas, like reading lots of different books, traveling to lots of different places, including outside of reading books outside of economics, talking to people who act with scholars and in fields outside of economics, and trying to learn as many perspectives about the world as possible, because that can really inform your research and help you answer questions and find things that are interesting to study, but that economists aren’t so focused on right now.
学者简介：
Jacob Moscona目前是哈佛大学经济学、历史学与政治学的奖学金获得者，同时在麻省理工学院扶贫行动实验室（J-PAL）担任博士后。此前，他于2016年在哈佛大学取得学士学位，2021年在麻省理工学院取得博士学位。他的研究领域包括发展经济学、环境经济学和创新经济学。
参考文献：
Moscona, J. and Sastry, K. “Inappropriate Technology: Evidence from Global Agriculture.” Revision Requested, American Economic Review
| 责任编辑 | 李明、苏丹 |
| 整理翻译 | 苏丹、庞乃琛 |
| 校对 | Jacob Moscona |