ECON 452 RESEARCH PROPOSAL
Due Date: April 3, 2024
Your research proposal should, at the minimum, include a research question, its motivation, a concise literature review and a discussion of your contributions, data sources, and your empirical strategy. While summary statistics and preliminary results are not required, including them will be considered a bonus. Below, you can find more details on each part.
1. Research question: In your research proposal, you should have a clear statement of your research question. For instance, Baker et al. (2008) study the effect of the Quebec universal childcare program on maternal labor supply and parenting and parent outcomes. Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) investigate whether there is racial discrimination in the labor market in the sense that whether employers prefer otherwise identical White workers than Black workers. These are research questions.
2. Motivation: A paper’s motivation often appears in the early part of the introduction section, which describes why answering the research question raised in the paper is important. For example, Angrist et al. (2010) study the causal impact of charter schools on students’ academic performance. They argue for the importance of their research question by relating it to a debate on how to reduce racial achievement gaps. You may cite relevant papers or anecdotal evidence (e.g., from news or surveys) for motivation. The motivation part does not need to be long—it can be as short as 100 words. However, this part is very crucial and must be convincing so that your audiences have an incentive to continue reading your paper.
3. Literature review and contributions: The literature review section reviews the relevant literature. Your review should be concise: You only need to list the relevant papers without showing the details, with a few sentences describing why they are relevant. For a couple of very closely related papers, you may add more details (e.g., their research questions and main findings). The most important part of the literature review is to describe your contributions— what are new in your research? A contribution can be answering a new question, having better measurement from a new dataset, applying a more valid empirical strategy, etc. The length of this section can be around 2 pages using a font size of 12 and 1.5 spacing.
4. Data: The data section describes the data that you plan to use. You can use restricted- access data. For instance, Statistics Canada provides rich data in the context of Canada, e.g., census data, data from tax returns, data with intergenerational links, etc. Most of these data have restricted access and it takes time to apply for the access. Therefore, it is unlikely that you will have the data on hand when you write your proposal. In this case, you only need to specify the exact variables you plan to use for your research and how you define the sample for your analysis (e.g., how you restrict the age if you use individual-level data).
There are also various publicly available data from IPUMS (https://www.ipums.org/). PSID (https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/) and NLS (https://www.bls.gov/nls/) are frequently used panel data from the U.S. and many variables are publicly available. In general, 1 page should be enough for the data section.
5. Empirical strategy: This section describes the empirical strategy. You can use any em- pirical methods covered in this course: randomized control trial, difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, synthetic control method, or regression discontinuity design. If a re- gression is involved, you should specify the equations that you plan to estimate, and the meaning of each variable used in the regression equations. In addition, you should specify the identification assumptions (e.g., the assumption for the DID approach to be valid or the assumptions for valid instruments) and discuss how you plan to test or present evidence for the validity of the assumptions. In general, 1-2 pages should be enough, but the length is likely to depend on the empirical method you use. For instance, if you choose to propose a randomized experiment, this section is likely to be longer since you need to describe how you plan to carry out the experiment. You can refer to Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004), Dizon-Ross (2019), and Kessler et al. (2019) for experimental designs.
6. Summary statistics and preliminary results (optional): Providing summary statistics and preliminary results is not required for the proposal since you may not be able to do so if you plan to use restricted-access data. If you use publicly available data, you are encouraged to conduct some empirical analysis. You can get bonus points (up to 20% of the total mark) by providing relevant summary statistics and preliminary results.
In summary, 5 pages using a font size of 12 and 1.5 spacing (excluding any figures or tables) should suffice, but the length may differ due to the nature of your data or empirical strategy. Therefore, the proposal does not have a strict length requirement. It is important to keep in mind that the quality of your proposal depends on its content, not length.
References
Angrist, Joshua D, Susan M Dynarski, Thomas J Kane, Parag A Pathak, and Christopher R Walters (2010), “Inputs and impacts in charter schools: Kipp lynn.” American Economic Review, 100, 239–243.
Baker, Michael, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan (2008), “Universal childcare, maternal labor supply, and family well-being.” Journal of political Economy, 116, 709–745.
Bertrand, Marianne and Sendhil Mullainathan (2004), “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination.” American Economic Review, 94, 991–1013.
Dizon-Ross, Rebecca (2019), “Parents’ beliefs about their children’s academic ability: Implications for educational investments.” American Economic Review, 109, 2728–2765.
Kessler, Judd B, Corinne Low, and Colin D Sullivan (2019), “Incentivized resume rating: Eliciting employer preferences without deception.” American Economic Review, 109, 3713–3744.