Managerial Economics Mini Paper Summer 2014

Mini Paper

Managerial Economics

Summer 2014

This paper’s objective is to give you an introduction into conducting an empirical research and presenting the results of that research in a professionally written paper.  To carry out this research, you will identify an economic relationship (or a demand equation) between variables that are interesting to you.  In your paper, you will describe this relationship and present a lucid argument for the importance of a better understanding of this relationship.  And then, collecting appropriate data, you will empirically estimate this relationship along with all of the appropriate goodness of fit tests and statistics.  Finally, you will analyze and report the results of your empirical estimation with particular emphasis on how these results are important and useful for a manager of a business enterprise or an economic agent faced with a choice.   Your final report must contain the following sections:

1. Brief Introduction and Literature Review – Discuss and flesh out the motivation for the economic relationship you are estimating in this paper.  While you do not have to go into lengthy discussions about the underlying economic theory, it should be sufficiently detailed so the relationship you are estimating is made clear to the reader.  In this section, you should include a short discussion of the literature.  While it does not need to be exhaustive, pick three to five papers to frame your research and place it in context.

    

2. Data Description – Give a brief discussion of the data and how/where they were collected.  At the minimum, you should note the time range of the data, scales of the data (i.e., data in millions of dollars or thousands of tons, etc.), and any notable events that may be applicable to your data set (such as change in corporate ownership or natural disasters, etc.).  Also, you should describe the institutional setting of your data.  E.g., you should discuss the business with an eye towards how some unique industry practices might have an impact on the specific data that you had collected.  Also include a table of basic descriptive statistics for your data.  Your description of the data would surely be aided by carefully drawn charts of your data.

    

3. Regression Model and Results – Carefully develop your regression model.  You must support your model with a “story” of why the right hand side variables you include are important and/or with the support of the relevant economic theory (including your hypotheses).  Report your regression results in an equation form (see the textbook for how this is done) or a table form.  Be sure to report all relevant statistics: coefficient estimates, standard error, R², various test statistics, etc.

    

4. Discussion and Diagnostic Tests – Carry out all appropriate “goodness of fit” tests and briefly discuss the “fit” of your regression equation.  Which form is the preferred: linear or log-linear?  Explain your conclusion.  Finally, carefully describe what your empirical results are telling you about your hypothesized economic relationship that you had outlined in part a.

    

5. Conclusion – What does your regression tell you about the demand in the industry?  What more can be done in the future? 

While there will not be a hard page limit for this paper, overall, this mini report should be seven to ten double spaced pages long with 1” margins, not including tables and diagrams (plots of your data, if you are including them). 

Please keep in mind that the objective of this mini project is to get your hands dirty working with a data set that is interesting to you.  As such, we are not looking to break new theoretical ground – just come up with a simple economic relationship and model it using a simple yet robust regression.

Style requirements: please use either APA or Chicago/Turabian citation styles.

Due Dates:

May 30:              One to two page proposal.  This will contain a rough description of what you want to model along with what types of data will be required and how you will obtain them.  Note that it is not necessary that you have the data in hand by this date.

June 9:                One to two page progress report.  By this time, you should have collected most, if not all, of your required data.  Describe the data: means, variances, etc.  Include a plot of the data.

                           Your report will, at the minimum, include the following:

• Description of the model (including modifications that were suggested from the proposal).

• Regression Equation of the model.

• Table(s) that describes the data (means, variances, min, max, # of observations).

• Figures/plots of the data.

• For any data that has not been collected yet, a complete and detailed description of when and where the data will be collected (must include documentation, website, and/or contact information of the (potential) source).

   

  June 27:              Final papers are due by 5 pm.  This report should contain the five sections described on page 1 along with:

1. Simple cover page

2. References (Three sources minimum, must be in proper format)

3. Appendix (at minimum include excel spreadsheet printout of the regression(s), other possibilities include data description, data sources, etc.)

    

   Grading:

    

               Only the Progress Report and the Final Paper will be graded.  Progress Report will make up 25% of the total Mini Paper Grade while the Final Paper will make up the remaining 75%.  Please note that late submissions without prior approval of the instructor will incur a substantial late penalty.  A grading rubric follows.