Econ

TERM PAPER-DATA (30 POINTS)

Your first deliverable for your term paper is proof of data. Before you pose your question, I want to ensure that you have access to appropriate data that you can utilize to answer it. Moreover, if you struggle to find a topic, your data can inform your choice of topic. You have four deliverables for this assignment, detailed below.

1. Topic • This only needs to be a few sentences, briefly describing what you hope to study

given the data you’ve found. For example, from Moellman and Vaughn (2023), the topic might be something like “I want to study the effect access to Medicaid has on Food Hardship in the US. Given the availability of the data, I will study this relationship from 2001-2022, focusing on controlling for state level and demographic characteristics.”

• This can change as you work on your paper. 2. Technical Documentation/Data Dictionary

• This describes the structure of the data, the variables contained, the nature of measurement, etc.

• I want to see this so that I know you have access to this resource. • This also gives me a better idea of what you are using. • If you plan to use multiple years of data, you do not need to submit the technical

documentation for each year, although you should have this on hand for yourself. • This can take many forms. In some instances, it might be a document provided

alongside the data in .pdf, .doc, or other standard file format. In some instances, it might be a text file (.txt) often labeled something like README. In some instances, it might be an additional spreadsheet in an Excel workbook.

• For example, the technical documentation for the primary source of data for the most recent year provided for Moellman and Vaughn (2023) can be found here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/techdocs/cpsdec22.pdf

3. Brief description of the data • This does not need to be longer than a paragraph. I provide a list of things you

should address in this paragraph below, along with a brief example from Moellman and Vaughn (2023) in parentheses.

i. Agency/Source (US Census Bureau) ii. Level (Household/individual)

iii. Relevant Geography (State) iv. Limitations (Binned Income) v. Other Relevant Information

4. Summary Statistics

• I would like you to provide summary statistics for five relevant variables from the data. This does not need to be the final version of summary statistics you include in your paper.

• I want to see this to make sure you’ve opened the data, and are able to manipulate it.

• You may get as detailed as you like, but at a minimum, I would like to see a table similar to the following:

Var Mean SD Min Max Var1 Var2 Var3 Var4 Var5

• An example from Moellman and Vaughn (2023) would look like the following (next page)

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!