Research Project Econ 399 Summer/Spring 2021

Term Paper
• Every student should submit a term paper.
• The research paper would be about 2500-3000 words
• Single line spacing
• Font: Times New Roman
• Font size: 12
• Due date for submitting the term paper is Sunday August 8, 2021, at 3:00 pm
Edmonton time
• Format: Microsoft word (The term paper will be checked for plagiarism by a
plagiarism checker.
• Please write your full name, Id number, and section.
• Email me (xxxxxxxx) your term paper before the deadline.
• As part of your term paper, you must attach in the appendix all the STATA
output that you estimate as we as the Do file that include all your codes.
Objective
By doing this empirical research paper, students should be able to apply all what they
have learned in their econometrics course, which contributes to a better understanding of
the material we covered in class. Another objective of doing this term paper is to
familiarize students with using STATA.
The research paper could aim at testing a theory in economics, or at analyzing some
economic behavior.
Chapter 19 in your textbook: Introductory Econometrics, A Modern Approach is very
useful in explaining how to write an empirical research project and gives a list of
examples of possible research topics.
Steps of an applied regression analysis:
1. Identify your research question or problem.
2. Review the literature and develop a theoretical model.
3. Specify the model by selecting the relevant explanatory variables and the functional
form.
4. Hypothesize the expected signs of the coefficients.
5. Collect, inspect and clean the data. ( you can benefit from the video posted on eclass
about how to get data)
6. Estimate and evaluate the equation.
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7. Document and discuss the results.
The submitted research paper should include the following sections:
1. Title: short and attractive.
2. Abstract: this is a summary of your paper (around 200-250 words)
3. Keywords: 3 to 5 keywords
4. A brief Introduction
• What is your research question?
• What is the hypothesis you are testing?
• Motivation: why is this research question important?
• Present a brief review of the related empirical literature and previous studies.
5. Data
• Describe the data (summary statistics for each variable mainly the mean and
standard deviation).
• What are your data sources?
6. Empirical methodology
• State the specification of the equation (functional form of the model).
• What is your dependent variable?
• What are the independent variables?
• How do you expect the independent variables to affect the dependent variable? In
other words is the relation positive or negative?
7. Empirical results:
• Present your estimated results in a full reporting form.
• Interpret the estimated coefficients and test your research hypothesis.
• Comment on the goodness of fit of the estimated model.
• Test the overall significance of your estimated model.
• Conduct appropriate tests to check that your estimated model is free from any
econometric problems such as specification errors, and Heteroskedasticity.
• If your model suffers from an econometric problem try to fix it.
• Test for group differences in the intercept and slopes using an F test or a Chow
test.
8. Summary & conclusions:
• A brief summary and discussion of the key results.
• Present any policy recommendations or suggestions for future research.
9. References
• List all the references that you used.