I’m working on a economics writing question and need guidance to help me study.

GUIDELINES

In this report, you describe your overall question and policy relevance, and describe your 3 key papers/articles. 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 a title that describes your topic. Yes, you will lose marks if you do not include a title page

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

Section 1. Introduce the context (e.g. Health care in Canada) and state your economic question(s) and the policy relevance of the question(s) (1 page).

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

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

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

c.Details about the data

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).

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.

f.potential policy implications of these results

g.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.

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

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

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 include a small sample or an inappropriate model or methods (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 under current conditions? Would one get the same estimates if the sample came from a different country, province, age group, ethnic group, etc?

Section 3. Second Paper (as for first paper)

Section 4. Third Paper (as for first paper)

Final Section. (1-2 pages). This should include:

Overall conclusions from the 3 papers regarding your economic question(s) and policy relevance

Unanswered questions/future research

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 health care expenditures is of potential relevance for health care 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 conclusions imply for policymakers. For example, a finding that health care expenditures lead to lower mortality rates implies that there is a clear benefit from such spending (although it does not tell us whether such spending is cost effective).

Writing and Formatting:

The text of your final paper(not counting title page) is to be at 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 or 2 then you must justify how it meets the criteria described in sections II.2.1, II.2.2 and II.2.3 of Report 1-Proposal. This justification (and nothing else) is to be placed on page 11.

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)

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

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.