Economics 98

Senior Honors Seminar in Economics

Patrick Conway

office: 300-F Gardner

telephone: 966-5376

office hours:

Introduction.

This course is the first of a two-semester sequence designed with one purpose: to facilitate your efforts in completing a senior honors thesis. You have demonstrated your academic ability in a wide range of courses by now, both within and outside the Economics Department. Completion of an honors thesis, however, represents a different challenge: the tasks of identifying a research topic, of defining an interesting and testable hypothesis about that topic, and of formulating a complete yet manageable research agenda to investigate the chosen hypothesis. These require skills not stressed in other courses. Our focus in Economics 98 will be upon refining those skills.

We will meet each Tuesday and Thursday at 2 pm in Gardner 308. The class format will vary from day to day, with "seminar" best describing the organization. Student participation and interaction will be highly valued. As we learn best by doing, the dominant pedagogical technique in this semester will be the case study. Each case study will involve the examination of a specific current economic topic with three goals in mind: (1) distillation of the topic into testable hypotheses; (2) matching these hypotheses with appropriate economic techniques; and (3) identification of the type of evidence appropriate to testing these hypotheses. Students are encouraged to suggest current economic topics of interest; these may be chosen from the listing below.

There is no required text for this course. There will be a great deal of reading, but this reading will be chosen by student searches for relevant information from textual and other sources. There are two written products required of each student in the course: a mid-term examination and a detailed thesis research agenda. Each student will receive a grade for the course. This grade will be based upon course activities as follows: research agenda (40 percent), mid-term examination (30 percent), class presentations (20 percent) and other class participation (10 percent).

Your primary assignment for this semester will be the identification of a research topic appropriate for your honors thesis: thus, the research agenda outlining that activity is given the greatest weight in grading. I will work with you to identify such a topic, and then will help you to identify a faculty member who will be your primary advisor thereafter. This faculty member will have expertise in the subject matter you have chosen and will provide guidance on theoretical and empirical analysis. Please talk with me about your research agenda before approaching faculty members to serve as your advisor; we can avoid misunderstandings and unintended offenses if you are properly prepared before pursuing advisors.

This course is only available to those who have met the Economics Department criteria for admission to the honors sequence. Those who have satisfied these criteria received a formal letter of invitation; if you have not received such a letter but believe that you also have satisfied the criteria, speak to me.

Course schedule (subject to amendment)

Weeks 1 - 4: Class discussion led by professor on four topics of current economic interest. Steps:

  1. identification of testable hypothesis.
  2. formulation of appropriate test, through reference to economic theory and statistical technique.
  3. collection of relevant evidence.
  4. performance of the hypothesis test.
  5. interpretation of results.

Weeks 5 - 10: Student-led class discussion on topics of current economic interest.

Weeks 11 - 15: Student presentations of chosen research topic and proposed research agenda.

Candidate topics of current economic interest