Research Project: Additional Guidelines
These guidelines borrow heavily from those of professors Christine Neill, Azim Essaji and Ridwan Karim. Their assistance is gratefully acknowledged.
1. Choosing a Topic
Subject to instructor approval, you may choose any topic for your EC481 project. The only criteria are:
a) There must be an economic approach to analyzing the question.
b) There must be some data that can be used to analyze the question.
There are multiple ways to identifying a topic. Here are a few tips:
• Try to choose a topic that genuinely interests you. You are likely to ask more interesting questions, be more enthusiastic, and come up with a better paper.
• Even if your interests fall outside economics, there may be economic or policy aspects to the topics that interest you. For example, if you are interested in psychology, there is a large literature on psychology and economics. Economic techniques have also been used to address sociological issues like crime. If you have passion for fine art, why not write something on the economics of the arts? There is a whole journal dedicated to the economics of wine, and at least one more to sports.
• Try reading through some recent economics magazines or newspaper to see if you find anything interesting.
• Read articles in recent issues of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. These articles target a wide audience and give you a good overview of various topics and what we know about these.
• Look at the list of articles in recent issues of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. These are articles written for an academic audience but they can give you a sense of interesting topics at the frontier of knowledge, are usually empirical in their research approach and (most importantly) have their data and code available.
Try and be as specific as possible with your topic, even though you may not have formulated an exact question. Good topics usually involve the interaction of two or more factors, e.g., “Immigrants and the Wages of the Native-born”, or “Oil Booms and Manufacturing Exports”. Topics like “Immigration Policy” or “Canada’s Monetary Policy” are examples of overly broad topics that are difficult to turn into manageable questions.
2. Formulate a Question
Once you have identified a topic, you need to devise the question you plan to answer. A good starting point is the 5W+H approach. To do this, we take the research question and ask the following: who, what, when, where, why and how? “Immigration and the Wages of the Native-Born” can thus be turned into “How have immigrants affected the wages of the native-born, in Canada (where), since 1980 (when)? Or, “Oil Booms and Manufacturing Exports” becomes “How did the oil boom affect Ontario’s (where) manufacturing exports in the 2000s (when)? Or, “Canada’s Monetary Policy” becomes “How did inflation targeting in the early 1990s (when) affect the Bank of Canada’s responsiveness to the inflation rate and output gap (what)?
In formulating your question, you need to be able explain why your question is interesting. As noted above, your paper must contain economic content. This means your paper must use an appropriate economic model to underpin its analysis.
3. Review the Literature
A review of the literature should provide evidence you have more than started to read, write, and think about your topic. A good review is organized by topic, not by author. Ideally the literature review can be inserted directly into the final draft of the paper.
A literature review is an account of what academic papers have been published on a specific topic. The literature review can be thought of as part of the introduction to a research paper, although it is usually ends up being its own section in the final paper.
When writing your literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader the knowledge and ideas established in the literature on a specific topic, as well as highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each paper in the literature.
As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept such as your research question, the problem or issue you are discussing, detail of how the literature has addressed your topic, as well as the structure of your thesis. The literature review is not a list of each paper you review. The literature review should be organized to tell a story to increase our understanding about your topic. Writing a literature review lets you demonstrate your understanding in two areas:
• information seeking: the ability to scan the literature efficiently, using manual or computerized methods, to identify a set of useful academic journal articles.
• critical appraisal: the ability to apply principles of analysis to identify unbiased/valid studies.
• Tip: Once you find one good article on your topic, you can work both backwards in time (what other articles do they cite in their literature review) and forwards in time (go to Google Scholar and find other articles which cite the work you identified).
Organization of Literature Review
As noted above, the literature review should be organized to tell a story to increase our understanding about your topic. To achieve this, your literature review should:
• be organized around and related directly to the thesis or research question you are developing
• synthesize the methodology/results of each paper into a summary of what is and is not known
• identify any areas of controversy in the literature
• formulate questions for further research
Reviewing a single paper in the literature
For each paper you identify in the literature, you should write a short summary to clarify your understanding of the paper. For each paper, ask yourself questions such as:
• How has the author formulated a problem/issue?
o Does the article contribute to our understanding of the problem under study? How?
o Does the article relate to the specific research question I am asking? How?
o How does the author structure their argument? Can you “deconstruct” the structure of their argument to see whether it breaks down logically?
• Has the author evaluated a relevant literature to your problem/issue?
• What is the theoretical framework (i.e., theoretical economic model) underlying the paper?
• What is the relationship between the theoretical and empirical perspectives?
• For empirical papers: what are the basic components of the study design (e.g., population, data source, variables, methodology)?
Reference: The Literature Review: A few tips on conducting it. Prepared by Dena Taylor, Health Sciences Writing Centre, and Margaret Procter, Writing Support. University of Toronto.
www.writing.utoronto.ca/advice/specific-types-of-writing/literature-review
4. Data Analysis
The approach taken will depend a lot on the topic and your creativity. Often the hardest part is not doing empirical analysis, but explaining what it means. Writing up your results will take you longer than you think. If you want extra help trying to find relevant data, the library can help – please contact the Business and Economics librarian, Yanli Li (yli@wlu.ca).
See also the additional notes on Data Analysis.
5. Redraft
Having completed your analysis, you will likely have to reformulate your thesis, and redraft the rest of your work. Redrafting is essential. You will need to cut out all the material that does not relate to your reformulated thesis. You also need to try and express yourself in the clearest and most concise manner possible.
6. Other Important Points
a) You must use scholarly sources for your analysis. Acceptable sources take the following forms, in order of quality:
i. Journal Articles
ii. Scholarly books or monographs
iii. Academic working papers
iv. Reports by reputable think tanks, UN agencies, government agencies.
You must have journal articles or scholarly books among your sources. Wikipedia is not an acceptable source.
b) Familiarize yourself with ways to track down sources, recommended:
i. Google Scholar
ii. EconLit
c) Make sure you use a proper citation style. You can import citations directly from Google Scholar and create bibliographies with ease.
d) Data Sources. Some data sources are:
• CANSIM for a variety of Canadian data.
• ODESI (available through the library’s website) has Canadian datasets such as the Census, the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), and the Labour Force Survey (LFS).
• The Penn-World Tables
• The World Bank’s World Development Indicators
• The IMF’s International Financial Statistics
• The COMTRADE database, for trade data
• The Center for International Data, for US and other trade data.
• The NBER for various US-focused datasets, including the Manufacturing Productivity Database
• The OECD Stat for macro data across countries
• World Economic Outlook (WEO) database for macro data across countries
• AMECO database for macro data for European Union countries
• IPUMS census and survey data around the world
• The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program
• World Values Survey
• Afrobarometer, Latinobarometer, Asian barometer survey
• European Social Surveys
• Global Preferences Survey
• Voter Study Group (link)
• + newly published papers require making data (and code) publicly available (see above), look at recent articles
7. Formatting
Here are some guidelines on how to format your final paper.
Most of your projects will fit in the following mold.
i. Introduction: this section should clearly state what you’re going to do, and provide a concise motivation for your project. Introduce your research question, and give the reader a short preview of your key findings as well.
ii. Literature review: here you should cover any relevant theory, present previous work related to your project, and situate your work in the wider literature.
iii. Background: Talk about the context in which your study take place (ie. NBA players, CEOs of tech firms, or households in rural Mexico)
iv. Conceptual framework: What does economic theory / intuition tell us about the problem? Can you state some hypotheses?
v. Data: present the main data sources you are using (how many observations are there?) and present some basic summary statistics of your key variables of interest and your control variables
vi. Methods: discuss the empirical model you estimate and how it helps to answer your research question. Can you say anything about the causal relationship between your variables? OR is this a correlational study? (This point is key)
vii. Results: This is where you present and interpret the findings. Your results should be presented through Tables and/or Figures. Be sure to interpret the coefficients carefully, discussing both the economic and the statistical significance. Once more, make sure you highlight whether the relationship is causal or not.
viii. Extensions (if applicable): these are regressions run on different sub-samples, using different estimation methods, including interactions with other variables, etc. You can roll this section into your results section.
ix. Conclusion: Concisely restate your findings. If you can come to some sort of higher conclusion, state that here.