Econometrics Research Paper

Project Proposal

Due Date: 3/7/21

Purpose:

The purpose of the project proposal is to make sure you get started working on your project sooner rather than later. It’s designed to give you an opportunity to start thinking about the specific question you are interested in studying. Furthermore, it will give you experience doing research by performing a literature review using the libraries website, and searching for data online.

Skills/Knowledge:

This Project Proposal will help you develop the following skills/knowledge which will help you in grad school/in the work place:

· Clearly and directly stating the goals of a research project.

· The ability to succinctly describe a complex data analysis project.

· The ability to navigate library search engines to find relevant articles.

· First hand experience finding and collecting relevant data.

· Be able to accurately summarize other’s research in order to convey their findings to others that have little to no experience with the literature.

· Provide you wit ha working knowledge of a particular subfield of economics related to your topic.

Tasks:

You need to complete the following steps in order to complete the project proposal:

1. Come up with a topic you are interested in studying. It can either be a specific question of interest you already have, or it can be something broader like housing markets, or basketball, or mutual fund trading.

2. Determine what is already known about your topic. Here you’ll do a literature review of published, peer reviewed, research projects related to your topic. You should read through the abstracts of at least 15-25 papers to get an idea of what’s known in the literature.

· You should use this information to help narrow down your focus on a specific question.

· Your specific question should address something that hasn’t be researched in the literature, or replicate a prior study with a different data set to verify its findings.

3. Take the 3-6 papers you found that are most closely related to your question and read them thoroughly. You may need to read each paper 2-3 times to truly understand it. While reading these papers think about the following questions:

· What is the primary research question of this paper?

· Why were the author’s interested in studying this question?

· What data did they use in their study? Where did it come from?

· What econometric techniques did they use in their study? (Note there are some techniques that will be outside the scope of this course, but be sure to note if they used OLS or any of the techniques we discussed here)

· What were the results of their study? Did they find that a key variable was significant/insignificant? Did they find a novel control variable improved the estimate of another parameter? What was the big take away the authors wanted their readers to know?

· What does this paper not address? Is there an obviously related question they do not study, and if so, why didn’t they focus on it?

4. Spend some time look to see what data is available to answer your question. You don’t need to have a clean and put together data set at this point, just know what’s out there that you can use.

5. Come up with the first model you plan to estimate to try an answer your question. What variables do you want to make sure to include and why?

6. Finally, summarize everything you’ve learned into a short paper.

Criteria for Success:

You should go through the following checklist and ensure your project proposal includes all of the following:

1. You should clearly state your primary research question of interest in one of the first two paragraphs.

2. You should have a few (3-5) paragraphs summarizing the literature related to your question, and explicitly state how what you’re doing is different/unique compared to prior research.

3. You should present your preliminary model, alongside where you plan to get your data from.

4. You should end your paper by stating your hypotheses for this study. What do you expect to learn/find?

5. Make sure to include a works cited page in order to give proper credit to your sources. Papers without one will be marked down at least 5 points.

6. Finally, be sure to follow the style guides listed below.

· Style Requirements:

i. Double spaced, Times New Roman 12 font, Margins 1 inch on all sides

ii. Chose a citation style, stick with it throughout the body of the paper and the works cited page.

iii. Paper must be clearly written, grammatically correct, and contain logical arguments and observations. No clichés, casual jargon (i.e. don’t say Yeet, Lit, etc…), contractions or abbreviations. Poorly written papers will cost you at least one letter grade.

iv. This is a technical paper, not an opinion piece. Make sure what you’re saying is supported by the results of your study.

v. Do not use any economic terms without defining them. Similarly, be clear with what you’re saying. Avoid sayings such as “too high”, “too many” ect…

vi. Don’t plagiarize. Including quotes or paraphrasing other’s work is fine with clear and appropriate citations.

vii. Your final draft is likely your fourth/fifth version of the paper. Read it and edit it multiple times. Make sure what you wrote is what you meant to say.

There are some example literature reviews available on canvas if you want to see what I believe a quality proposal looks like. If you have questions about the examples, or anything other part of this project proposal, be sure to reach out to me as sooner as possible so we can address your concerns in advance of the proposal being due.