Final Paper Guidelines

These guidelines borrow heavily from Drs. Christine Neill and Azim Essaji. Their assistance is gratefully acknowledged.

1. Choosing a Topic

Subject to instructor approval, you may choose any topic for your paper. The only criteria for an EC481 paper topics 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 sport.

•   Try reading through some recent economics magazines or newspaper to see if you find anything interesting.

•   Look at the list of articles in recent issues of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. These articles are often more readable and give a broader perspective than some of the more technical economic journals.

•   Look at recent issues ofThe Economists’ Voice.

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-ˇBorn” can thus be turned into “How have immigrants affected the wages of the native-ˇborn, 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.

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 ([email protected]).

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 mongraphs

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. I recommend:

i.       Google Scholar

ii.       EconLit

c)   Make sure you use a proper citation style. I prefer the Chicago Author-Date style. Details             on             this             style             can             be             found             here: http://library.williams.edu/citing/styles/chicago2.php. Word has an in-built citation tool that will enable you to generate proper citations in a variety to styles. It is a bit cumbersome to use. I prefer a free Word and Firefox add-in called Zotero. You can import citations directly from Google Scholar and create bibliographies with ease.

d)  Data Sources. Some recommended data sources are:

i.       CANSIM for a variety of Canadian data.

ii.       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).

iii.      The Penn-World Tables

iv.      The World Bank’s World Development Indicators

v.      The IMF’s International Financial Statistics

vi.      The COMTRADE database, for trade data

vii.      The Center for International Data, for US and other trade data.

viii.      The  NBER  for  various  US-focused  datasets,  including  the  Manufacturing

Productivity Database

ix.      The OECD Stat for macro data across countries

x.      World Economic Outlook (WEO) database for macro data across countries

xi.      AMECO database for macro data for European Union countries

7. Formatting

Your final paper should be roughly 20 pages in length (double spaced, maximum 12-point font, default margins). Here are some guidelines on how to format your final paper. This is based                on               the                Neugeboren                and               Jacobson               book:

https://writingproject.fas.harvard.edu/files/hwp/files/writingeconomics.pdf

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 preview of your key findings as well.

ii.       Background: here you  should  cover any relevant theory, present previous work related to your project, and situate your work in the wider literature.

iii.       Data and Methods: you can split this section up, presenting data before methods or methods  before  data;  in  most  of my  papers,  which  involve  variations  on  linear regressions,  I  present  the  basic  estimation  model,  talk  about  the  data,  and  then discuss  any  special  estimation  techniques  that  I  use  (e.g.,  "Since  the  dependent variable is bound between zero and one, I estimate Eq. 1 using a fixed-effects LOGIT model...", or “Since the dependent and independent variables are nonstationary, I estimate Eq. 1 in first differences …”).

iv.       Results: This is where you interpret the findings. Be sure to interpret the coefficients carefully, discussing both the economic and the statistical significance. Please don't interpret the r-squared of the regression: it is largely a meaningless statistic, unless you're doing a forecast.