[SOLVED] ECON 4F03 Fall 2024

ECON 4F03

Fall 2024

Guidelines for Report 3- Final Paper

Submission instructions:

An electronic copy must be submitted to Avenue dropbox.

If you submit your work late (without submitting an MSAF) you will be penalized.  Each day is a 10% penalty.

If you submit an MSAF, you still must submit the Final Paper.

Use of Generative AI

Students are not permitted to use generative AI in this course. In alignment with McMaster    academic integrity policy, it “shall bean offence knowingly to …  submit academic work for assessment that was purchased or acquired from another source” .  This includes work created by generative AItools.  Also stated in the policy is the following, “Contract Cheating is the act of “outsourcing of student work to third parties” (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016,p. 639) with or without payment.” Using Generative AI tools is a form. of contract cheating.  Charges of academic dishonesty will be brought forward to the Office of Academic Integrity.

GUIDELINES

In this report, you describe your overall question and policy relevance, and describe your 3 key papers/articles from your summary.  You then analyze some of their strengths and weaknesses. Your  main  job  is  to  demonstrate  your  understanding  of  what  constitutes  strong  and  weak economic research, that is, to evaluate the quality of the methods rather than your personal agreement (or not) with any given policy position. I want your paper to be a balanced review of evidence.

Make a title page with your name and your economic question. 2

Recommended Structure of the 4F03  Final Paper (Length of paper: 10 pages)

Section 1.  Introduce the context and state your economic question and the policy relevance of the question (0.5-1 page). 8

Section 2.  Paper 1 (approximately 2-2.5 pages)

a.   Complete reference for the article and a web link. 2

b.   Question addressed or hypothesis tested in the article and how it relates to your question in the introduction 2

c.    Details about the data 3

i.   Was it observational data or experimental data?  If observational, could it be regarded as using a natural experiment?  If experimental, was it a lab, social or field experiment?

ii.   Type of data: panel/time series/cross-sectional

iii.   Unit of observation: does a data point correspond to a household, a firm, an industry,a province/state,a country, etc

iv.   Data   source(s).   e.g   Statistics   Canada-Survey   of   Labour   and   Income Dynamics.

v.   Years and geographic area vi.   Number of observations

d.   Empirical  model  and estimation  methods (e.g. linear model with ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, etc). 3

e.   The key results in relation to part b.  Note that you must tie the key results to the research question you listed in part b.  3

f.    Explain how the results help to answer your research question (as stated in your introduction). Sometimes the question answered  by the article will  be exactly the same  as the  one you  are  answering-sometimes  it  will  be  related  but  not identical. 2

g.   potential policy implications of these results 2

h.   A   few   (2   or   3   total)   internal   strengths   and/or   weaknesses   (include   your reasoning!)  4

i.    A   few   (2   or   3   total)  external  strengths  and/or  weaknesses   (include  your reasoning!)  4

25 marks per article = 75 marks total for article reviews

Recall that internal strengths and weaknesses refer to whether (or not) the authors’ conclusions are valid for the population from which the sample was drawn to estimate the model.  Typical weaknesses includeselected samples, small samples, inappropriate model or methods for the data available (e.g OLS doesn’t handle omitted variables, simultaneity, or measurement error in the x variables.)

Recall that external strengths and weaknesses refer to whether (or not) the authors’ conclusions are valid for a different population than that from which the sample used to estimate the model was drawn.  How old are the data? Would one get the same estimates undercurrent conditions?  Would one get the same estimates if the sample came from a different country, province, age group, ethnic group, etc.?

Section 3. Paper 2 (same structure as section 2) Section 4. Paper 3 (same structure as section 2) Final Section. (1-2 pages). This should include:

Overall conclusions from the 3 papers regarding your economic question and the policy relevance of the results  10 marks

Unanswered questions/future research   5 marks

Clarification of terminology:

POLICY RELEVANCE. Refers to the policies to which a paper potentially applies. For example, an article on the relationship between mortality rates and healthcare expenditures is of potential relevance for healthcare policy. There is no reference to the actual conclusions of the paper.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS. Refers to the actual conclusions of the paper and what those conclusionsimply for policymakers. For example,a finding that healthcare expenditures lead to lower mortality rates implies that there is a clear benefit from such spending (although it does not tellus whether such spending is cost effective).

Writing and Formatting:

The text of your final paper (not counting title page or any reference pages or tables/figures) is to beat most 10 printed pages in length.  There is only one exception to this page limit: if a paper included in this report was not included in report 1(Proposal) or report 2(Summary) then you must justify how it meets the criteria described in sections II.2.1, II.2.2 and II.2.3 of the guidelines for the Proposal.  This justification (and nothing else) is to be placed on page 11 following.

All margins set to 2.5cm, use 12pt fonts and line spacing=1.5.

Points will be deducted for poor spelling and grammar.  Use a spell check and grammar check.

In-text citation: Cuff (1998) or Smith, Jones and Barry (2009)

If using direct quotes(which must be placed in quotation marks) or paraphrasing.  Better to AVOID quotes and use your own words/ use paraphrasing.

Follow the APA citations style as explained in the video found at:

APA 7th in Minutes: In-Text Citations (youtube.com)

A partial list of practices to avoid

Long paragraphs.  (Paragraphs are used to indicate a change in topic.) Contractions (won’t, can’t, etc.)

Frequent use of the first person (I will discuss, I will show, etc.) Informal or “chatty” style of writing.

Acknowledging Sources.  Please be VERY careful to acknowledge all sources which you consulted during the preparation of your paper.  You should reference not just published work, but also unpublished papers, including those of other students, and previous papers of your own.

YOUR WRITTEN SUBMISSIONS WILL BE CHECKED  BY TURNITIN.COM. Turnitin provides a very effective report on the extent to which your text matches the text in journal articles, working papers and other student papers. Please see the Course Outline for further details on Academic Ethics.

Do  not  worry  if  it  substantially  matches  your  summary-I  expect  it  do so  as  the  final  paper fleshes out your summary!  Also do not worry if it matches quotes from the article-that is also to be expected!

Writing Help

McMaster have free access to an on-line program to help with writing.  The user copies and pastes text into the program and receives notification of errors and suggestions for corrections. This program is called Grammarly. To register as a user, go to http://www.grammarly.com/edu/and click on “Sign Up” at the top of the page.

Note that your final paper will be graded on both economic content and writing style/errors.