Research paper resources
Writing a research paper
- Writing Tips for Economics Research Papers (Plamen Nikolov) - This is very good, but it targeted for graduate students
- Structure of Economic Research Papers (Plamen Nikolov) - This is another, very good, take on how to structure an undergraduate economic research paper.
Suggested topics
Adapted from Wooldridge
The following suggested topics are taken from Wooldridge. These can be used as a starting point for your own idea generation. You can use these questions as is, you can focus on a specific aspect of a question, or you can add an additional subgroup or covariate to extend the analysis.
If you want to access the referenced data sets, just let me know.
What factors might explain racial/ethnic and gender differences in employment and wages? For example, Holzer (1991) reviewed the evidence on the “spatial mismatch hypothesis” to explain differences in employment rates between blacks and whites. Korenman and Neumark (1992) examined the effects of childbearing on women’s wages, while Hersch and Stratton (1997) looked at the effects of household responsibilities on men’s and women’s wages. Push harder than just identifying whether gender or racial/ethnic wage gaps exist (they do!).
Do your own “audit” study to test for discrimination in hiring (by race, gender, some other dimension). Have pairs of equally qualified friends, say, one male and one female, apply for local job openings in local bars or restaurants. You can provide them with phony resumes that give each the same experience and background, where the only difference is gender (or race, or something else). Then, track who gets the interviews (and/or job offers). Neumark (1996) described one such study conducted in Philadelphia. A variant would be to test whether general physical attractiveness or a specific characteristic, such as being obese or having visible tattoos or body piercings, plays a role in hiring decisions. You would want to use the same gender in the matched pairs, and it may not be easy to get volunteers for such a study.
Obtain monthly or quarterly data on teenage employment rates, the minimum wage, and factors that affect teen employment to estimate the effects of the minimum wage on teen employment. Solon (1985) used quarterly U.S. data, while Castillo-Freeman and Freeman (1992) used annual data on Puerto Rico. It might be informative to analyze time series data on a low-wage state in the United States–where changes in the minimum wage are likely to have the largest effect.
Do parental consent laws increase the teenage birthrate? You can use state level data for this: either a time series for a given state or, even better, a panel data set of states. Do the same laws reduce abortion rates among teenager? The Statistical Abstract of the United States contains all kinds of state-level data. Levine, Trainor, and Zimmerman (1996) studied the effects of abortion funding restrictions on similar outcomes. Other factors, such as access to abortions, may affect teen birth an abortion rate.
There is also recent interest in the effects of “abstinence only” sex education curricula. one can again use state-level panel data, or maybe even panel data at the school district level, to determine the effects of abstinence-only approaches to sex education on various outcomes, including rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teen birth rates.
Do change in traffic laws affect traffic fatalities? McCarthy (1994) contains an analysis of monthly time series data for the state of California. A set of dummy variables can be used to indicate the months in which certain laws were in effect. The file TRAFFIC2 contains the data used by McCarthy. An alternative is to obtain a panel data set on states in the United States, where you can exploit variation in laws across states, as well as across time. Freeman (2007) is a good example of a state-level analysis, using 25 years of data that straddle changes in various state drunk driving, seat belt, and speed limit laws.
Use panel data to study the effects of various economic policies on regional economic growth. Studying the effects of taxes and spending is natural, but other policies may be of interest. For example, Craig, Jackson, and Thomson (2007) study the effects of Small Business Association Loan Guarantee programs on per capita income growth.
Do differences in tax codes across states affect the amount of foreign direct investment? Hines (1996) studied the effects of state corporate taxes, along with the ability to apply foreign tax credits, on investment from outside the United States