Creating papers in FaKe LaTeX

Many researchers will be familiar with LaTeX, which is a software system used for laying out documents (like research articles or presentations). It is an alternative to MS Word or Powerpoint, and is widely used in mathematically-heavy fields, because it create nice-looking equations and is more aesthetically pleasing overall than most documents created in Word or Powerpoint. That means that it is somewhat of a de facto standard in economics as well (for example, follow any of the links on my blog to an NBER Working Paper, and you will see the format in action). The problem with LaTeX is that there is a steep learning curve, and if you're not writing loads of mathematical equations, it isn't clear that the benefits of learning LaTeX outweigh the costs.

However, help is at hand. This 2019 article by Scott Irwin, published in the Journal of Economic Surveys (open access), describes how. As to why you would want to do this, Irwin notes that:

This led me to think that LaTeX was just another example of a ‘cool kids club’ that could be used to exclude the ‘uncool kids’...

If you want to join the 'cool kids club' without expending the time and effort to learn LaTeX, this might be a way to fake your way in. Irwin describes step-by-step how to create a LaTeX-looking document in MS Word (and a way to create a presentation in Powerpoint that looks like it was created using Beamer, the presentation software that LaTeX uses). Alternatively, he has templates on his personal website (scroll down, and you can find them under 'Miscellaneous').

Irwin's article summarises the pros and cons of the FaKe LaTeX approach as:

Pros

• Looks great
• Simplicity of Word
• Ease of sharing documents
• Tracking changes for shared editing
• Tables and charts may be produced in Excel
• Quick and easy to learn and implement

Cons

• Math formatting may not be optimal
• Less availability of journal templates
• Reference management not automated

Another con is that it doesn't appear that you can easily create the in-document hyperlinks to tables and figures that are a feature of most LaTeX documents. However, the templates still create LaTeX-adjacent documents that plausibly look like they were created in LaTeX to the untrained eye. So, if you too want to join the 'cool kids club', now you can!