Research Paper: Research Proposal

Objective

The goal of this submission is for you to translate your research idea and data set into the outline of a workable paper. You can think of your research proposal as “baby paper”: a summary of what your question is, why it matters, and how you intend to solve it.

For this assignment, some basic data work is necessary. However, you may find it helpful to explore some analyses to get a better sense of what empirical specifications are feasible.

Components

While our first two assignments were fairly informal, this is a formal paper - meaning that I will pay close attention to not only what ideas you present, but also how you present them. Your proposal should be at least 1200 words (excluding references) and include the following components:

1. Introduction that contains (1) a clearly stated research question. What hypotheses are you testing? (2) Motivation - why is this important/interesting?

2. Literature review: discussion of related literature and how your paper fits in

3. Data description: Description of data set - make sure you include the sources!

4. A “summary statistics” table that includes the basic descriptive statistics that will be relevant to your analysis. Ultimately, this table will probably be the first table in your final paper. It should be formatted nicely (i.e., not copied directly out of Stata) with easy-to-interpret variables names and column headers, and it will likely include the following:

• Number of observations
• Means and standard deviations of your dependent variable(s)
• Means and standard deviations of your key independent variable(s)
• If you are comparing two (or more) groups, you will likely want to report means separately for each group.
• Any other details that might be relevant to your data (i.e. number of states, number of years, number of households, etc.)

5. Empirical specification: You must include the empirical specification of the regression(s) you are estimating, along with a clear description of what each variable is.

6. Planned analysis: How will your results answer your research question? What challenges/limitations will you face? This is a good place to discuss any omitted variable bias, other possible violations of our assumptions

7. Bibliography - for any references cited in your proposal plus any data sources

8. (Optional) Outline of tables: In as much detail as possible, outline the tables you plan to include (no numbers necessary)

Your annotated bibliography will help you in push forward your motivation and the literature review.

Keep in mind that the more detail you include, the better the feedback you’ll receive! A classmate will provide a peer review of your proposal, providing feedback to help you turn your proposal into a final paper

Consult the grading rubric for additional guidance!

Submission requirements

Your research proposal should be written in paragraph form (i.e. complete sentences, not bullet points), copy-edited for grammatical/spelling errors, and submitted as a word or PDF document.

Examples

See Blackboard for example proposals. These are not perfect, but they are all of high quality.