An economics PhD thesis rarely has one literature review chapter in the way a humanities or education thesis does — most UK economics doctorates are three-essay or paper-based theses, and each essay carries its own literature review organised around a formal model and an empirical literature, classified by JEL code. Here is how to build that review, chapter by chapter, in the way examiners in the field actually expect it.
- Confirm whether your thesis needs one literature review or several.
- Classify your topic by JEL code before you start searching.
- Search the working-paper repositories economics actually runs on.
- Separate the theoretical literature from the empirical literature.
- Organise the review around the model, not around a chronology of authors.
- Position your contribution against a specific, named gap.
- Write the synthesis, not a summary of each paper in turn.
- Check the review against your target field’s top journals.
- Decide whether the review is a standalone section or folded into the introduction.
- Handle co-authored essays and the literature review’s authorship declaration.
Step 1: Confirm whether your thesis needs one literature review or several
Most UK economics PhDs are examined as three connected but independent essays rather than as a single monograph with one literature review chapter up front. If your thesis follows this structure, each essay needs its own, self-contained review of the literature relevant to that essay’s specific question — not a shared review chapter that all three essays then draw on. Confirm this with your supervisor in year one: writing three separate, tightly scoped reviews is a materially different task from writing one long review chapter, and candidates who assume the traditional single-chapter structure often have to substantially restructure work already written. Sitting down with your supervisor in the first term to agree the thesis format — three-essay versus monograph — settles this before any literature review work begins, in the same way a management doctorate has to settle its research problem before it can specify testable hypotheses.
Step 2: Classify your topic by JEL code before you start searching
The Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) classification system, maintained by the American Economic Association, organises the discipline into major fields — among them C (Mathematical and Quantitative Methods), D (Microeconomics), E (Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics), F (International Economics), G (Financial Economics), H (Public Economics), J (Labor and Demographic Economics) and O (Economic Development and Growth) — each further subdivided into specific codes. Identify the two or three JEL codes that describe your essay’s topic before you begin searching; economics papers, working papers and course reading lists are routinely tagged and searchable by JEL code, and knowing your own classification lets you find the adjacent literature a keyword search alone will miss.
Step 3: Search the working-paper repositories economics actually runs on
Economics moves through working papers faster than through published journal articles — a result can be cited and built on for two or three years before it appears in a journal, if it ever does. Build your search around the discipline’s own working-paper infrastructure: NBER Working Papers for US-centred macro, labour, and public economics; IZA Discussion Papers for labour economics specifically; CEPR Discussion Papers for European and international topics; SSRN’s Economics Research Network for finance-adjacent work; and RePEc/IDEAS, which indexes working papers and journal articles together across all of these sources and lets you search by JEL code directly. A literature review built only from published journal articles in economics is, by the field’s own norms, working from a dataset that is already two to three years out of date.
Step 4: Separate the theoretical literature from the empirical literature
Economics literature reviews conventionally split into two distinct strands that get organised, and often written, separately: the theoretical literature, which establishes the mechanism or model your essay builds on or departs from, and the empirical literature, which establishes what has actually been measured and found. A worked illustration — invented for this example, not a real thesis — of an essay on minimum wage effects on small-firm employment would need a theoretical strand covering competitive versus monopsony labour-market models, and a separate empirical strand covering the difference-in-differences and synthetic-control studies that have measured the actual employment response, with the review making explicit where the empirical findings do or do not match what each theoretical model predicts. Keep the two strands legibly distinct even where they interact closely: a reader should be able to tell, from the structure of your review alone, which claims rest on formal theoretical derivation and which rest on estimated coefficients from a specific dataset and identification strategy, because examiners will test each type of claim differently at the viva.
Step 5: Organise the review around the model, not around a chronology of authors
A common failure mode imported from other social sciences is writing the review as “Smith (2015) found X, then Jones (2018) found Y, then Patel (2021) found Z” — a chronological march through authors rather than an argument. Economics examiners expect the review organised around the theoretical mechanism or empirical specification instead: which model or identification strategy each paper uses, what that choice lets it claim and what it cannot, and where your own essay’s model or identification strategy sits relative to that set of choices. The chronology of publication dates is almost never the organising logic that matters.
Step 6: Position your contribution against a specific, named gap
State explicitly what specific paper, model, or empirical setting your essay departs from and how — a new identification strategy applied to an old question, an existing model extended to a new setting, or a specific empirical anomaly the existing literature has not resolved. “Adds to the growing literature on X” is not a contribution statement an economics examiner will accept; “extends the Card and Krueger identification strategy to a setting with a plausibly exogenous minimum-wage variation that the existing UK literature lacks” is the level of specificity expected.
Step 7: Write the synthesis, not a summary of each paper in turn
Group papers by the theoretical position or empirical finding they share or contest, and write each paragraph around that shared position rather than around one paper at a time. A paragraph that says which three papers find a null effect using a particular identification strategy, and why, is doing the field’s expected work; three consecutive paragraphs that each summarise one paper are not, however accurate each summary is individually.
Step 8: Check the review against your target field’s top journals
Before finalising an essay’s literature review, check that you have covered the relevant recent work in the field’s top general and field-specific journals — the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies for the discipline generally, plus the leading field journal for your specific JEL area (the Journal of Labor Economics for labour, the Journal of Public Economics for public finance, and so on). A review that is comprehensive on working papers but has missed a directly relevant paper in one of these venues is the gap an examiner is most likely to raise first. This field-anchored approach differs sharply from disciplines whose reviews range across a wider, less codified journal landscape — see how an education doctorate builds its theoretical framework from named theorists rather than a ranked set of journals, and how a history PhD’s evidence base sits in archives and catalogues instead of a working-paper circuit.
Step 9: Decide whether the review is a standalone section or folded into the introduction
Economics papers and thesis essays frequently fold the literature review directly into the introduction rather than giving it a separate, titled section — a structural choice that differs from the standalone literature review chapter conventional in many other social sciences. Check recent papers in your target sub-field’s leading journal to see which convention dominates there: a labour economics paper in a top field journal, for instance, will often run through the relevant literature in two or three paragraphs of the introduction before stating its own contribution, rather than deferring that discussion to a separate section several pages later. Match your essay’s structure to what your own sub-field actually publishes, not to a generic thesis-writing template.
Step 10: Handle co-authored essays and the literature review’s authorship declaration
Economics doctorates more often than most fields include a co-authored essay, typically with a supervisor or another academic collaborator. Where an essay is co-authored, UK universities generally require a declaration stating each author’s specific contribution, and the literature review within that essay is not exempt from this — if your co-author drafted the theoretical-literature section while you drafted the empirical-literature section, that division needs to be stated explicitly in the declaration your examiners will read before assessing the chapter. Agree this division, and how it will be described, with your co-author well before submission rather than reconstructing it retrospectively.
FAQ
Should a theoretical and an empirical literature strand be reviewed together or separately?
Keep them structurally distinct even when discussed in the same section — a reader should be able to tell from the review’s structure which claims rest on formal theory and which rest on an estimated empirical result, because examiners test each differently at the viva.
Does an economics PhD thesis have one literature review chapter?
Usually not. Most UK economics doctorates are three-essay theses, and each essay carries its own literature review scoped to its specific question, rather than sharing one review chapter.
What is a JEL code, and why does it matter for a literature search?
JEL codes are the American Economic Association’s classification system for economics scholarship. Identifying your own topic’s JEL codes lets you search working papers and journals by classification rather than keyword alone, surfacing adjacent literature a keyword search would miss.
Where should an economics literature review search besides published journals?
NBER, IZA and CEPR working paper series, SSRN’s Economics Research Network, and RePEc/IDEAS, which indexes both working papers and journal articles searchable by JEL code.
Should an economics literature review be organised by publication date?
No. Organise it around the theoretical model or empirical identification strategy each paper uses, not around a chronological sequence of authors and years.
What makes a strong contribution statement in an economics thesis?
Naming the specific paper, model or empirical setting your essay departs from and exactly how — a new identification strategy, an extended model, or an unresolved empirical anomaly — rather than a general claim to add to a literature.
How current does an economics literature review need to be?
Current to working papers from the last one to two years, not only to published journal articles, because economics results circulate as working papers for years before formal publication.
What are the top general economics journals to check a review against?
The American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies, alongside the leading field-specific journal for your JEL area.
Does an economics thesis literature review need its own titled section?
Not always. Many economics papers and essays fold the literature discussion into the introduction rather than giving it a separate section — check the convention in your own sub-field’s leading journal before choosing a structure.
How should a co-authored essay’s literature review handle authorship?
Declare each author’s specific contribution to the essay, including which parts of the literature review each author drafted, in the authorship declaration your examiners will read before assessing the chapter.
Keep each essay’s review current as working papers appear
An economics literature review goes stale faster than in almost any other field, because the discipline’s frontier lives in working papers rather than in published journals. Tesify’s thesis writing workspace helps you track and organise sources by JEL code and update each essay’s review as new working papers appear, rather than discovering at submission that a key NBER paper landed after your last search.