Final Project

Catalog description

The final project course is the culmination of our efforts during the master's degree. It is designed to scaffold the development of your final research project. It is a hands-on course designed to guide students on how to conduct economic research and prepare a research thesis or policy proposal. An important aspect of the course is to provide a forum to discuss project progress and provide each other with economic analysis feedback. The course has three parts. The first part is a practical guide for using statistical software such as STATA to master handling and visualizing data using standard statistical methods, and making inferences. This component will utilize labs and also covers topics on how to write a research thesis or policy report by formulating a research question and hypothesis, searching for related literature, preparing a literature review, citing literature, structuring a document, and presenting findings. The second part involves a replication exercise of a published economics/finance paper. The last part of the course requires students to extend on the replicated paper in a significant direction.