Research idea
Think of a small research project that you would like to perform. This can be something like the analysis of the gender gap in wage that we did in class, or estimating the impact of a policy . There are also lots of ideas on effects of policies in the news (NYTimes, the Economist), and, as you saw from the assignments, lots more ideas in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics or Economic Policy (on the web at http://www.aeaweb.org/aea_journals.php)
Write a description (maximum 2 page) including the following:
1. What relationship would you like to estimate? Why is the relationship/research interesting?
2. What equation(s) would you estimate? Be very precise on the indices.
What will be the unit of analysis (households, firms, states, etc…)?
3. What data would you need to estimate the relationship? Where could you find such data?
4. What result(s) would you expect to find?
Will there be a problem in the estimation due to omitted variable bias? How would you deal with such a problem?
Are there any robustness checks that you would do?
