ECB3INQ Causes and Consequences of Inequality: Research Proposal guidelines

24-11-2023 – Emilie Rademakers

The aim of the endterm assignment is for you to dig deeper into a particular topic and paper, and develop your own research proposal based on what you learned during class. Are you able to formulate and motivate a research question? Are you able to come up with an accompanying methodology that would allow you to answer this research question? Remember that you do not have to actually execute anything. You can come up with any experiment or a policy evaluation as long as they contain reasonable designs and data we can observe. E.g., don’t propose anything that is unethical (forcing women to change their fertility choices) or against the laws of nature (observing people thoughts).

Instructions for the research proposal:

1.       Use one of the papers presented by a different group as a starting point: in order to give you a place to start, please use one of the papers present by a different group that you would like to use a topic for your own research idea. Try to come up with a follow-up question to the paper. That can take many forms, e.g., look at a different outcome, a different setting, perhaps come up with a mechanism that you can test which might explain the outcome of the paper,… Sometimes papers’ conclusion with contain avenues for future research, so that might be a place to start looking! We are doing this not to limit your imagination, but rather to anchor it, and to make sure that we stay within the topics of the course. The discussions after every tutorial should give you a place to start imagining which direction a follow-up project could take.

2.       Use the lecture material to motivate the topic. After you have selected one of presented papers as a starting point, use the lecture material to motivate the topic from a wide perspective. For example, why are people interesting in wage disparities between men and women? Why do we care about intergenerational mobility? You are welcome to add more motivating facts and frameworks, but try to attach them to the scientific arguments that we also reviewed during class. No polemics, please, proposals might come down on a particular “side” of an issue, but should be grounded in substantive arguments.

3.       Use the lecture material to formulate a research question. Your research proposal should contain a clear research question, which contains the hypothesis you would like to test. For example, the paper by Carlsson et al. (2015) “ The effect of Schooling on Cognitive Skills” which we discussed during the lecture on human capital contains the research question: what is the effect of additional days on schooling on cognitive test performance? (Hint: the research question is often in the title of the paper as well.) It’s often helpful to try to come up with an actual question and write that down. (i.e., your research proposal should have a sentence with a question mark attached 😉.) Additional hypothesis that you formulate, might be by looking at a different kind of outcome, for example, motivated by seeing this outcome being presented in a different paper. It could also be that you try to formulate a question that tries to explain a mechanism, based on the theory that we discussed. For example, one of the papers on gender shows evidence for statistical discrimination taking place in the process of hiring men versus women. During class, we saw a model of the parameters that drive statistical discrimination: strength of the signal, differences in the groups averages,... Can you formulate a hypothesis that test the impact of changing one of these parameters, to understand how important it is for the existence of statistical discrimination?

4.       Try to be precise when writing down your proposed methodology. First, describe what kind of data you would need to obtain. Second, what kind of design to you need to answer this question. The design description should be clear enough such that I could imagine the kind of regression that you would like to run. (Bonus points for writing an estimating equation that goes with it and interpreting the coefficient of interest.) If you want to take it a step further: Can you formulate what are necessary assumptions about your design that would allow you to answer your research question the way you have in mind? If you have a causal quasi-experimental design, do you need certain conditions to hold? If you have an experimental design, what might be risks for the design? If you have a fixed-effects regression, under what conditions can you interpret this causally?

5.       Try to end by saying what you think would be the relevant take away from your piece of research. What do you think you could potentially learn from it for the literature? And what might be learned for policy makers?

Submission guidelines

Research proposals should be up to 3 pages single space (or 1750 words) without referencing or tables/figures should you wish to include those.

Grading criteria

Quite simple, the instruction given above will be what we look for in papers: i) proper motivation and positioning; ii) formulating a research question that is grounded in a documented fact and/or economic theory; iii) formulate a methodology that is able to answer that research question (a more elaborate design can earn you more points; but so can the precision of being to explain what you intend to do); iv) motivation on what is the learning potential from your project.

On top of this content we will also take into account the format: i) Writing concisely and clearly; ii) having a clear structure; and iii) correct referencing of other papers.

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I have attached the specific paper and a lecture which is connected to the paper and which you need to use! so you understand the assignment? Since it is very important to also use the lecture :)