ECON5094

Topics in Applied Microeconomics Assessment

1. You are required to present two papers of your choice, and for one of these papers write an extended referee report.

2. Each presentation has weight of 15% (30% total) of the final grade, with the written report weighted as 70% of the final grade.

3. The first presentation must be on a topic covered in the first half of the course; the

second presentation must be on a topic covered in the second half. You should pick one of these for your written assignment.

4. To make sure your plan is feasible, you are encouraged to discuss your choice of the papers with the lecturers.

5. Try to choose papers on which you feel you are reasonably qualified to provide a critical assessment.

Deadlines

Presentation 1 - Oral presentation of academic paper in week 4/5 - during the lecture slot. Slides of your presentation should be submitted on Moodle by October 23, 2024, 12.00.

Presentation 2 - Oral presentation of academic paper in week 9/10 - during the lecture slot. Slides of your presentation should be submitted on Moodle by November 27, 2024, 12.00.

Written report is due on January 28, 2025, 12.00.

Guidelines on presenting an academic paper

You should consider the presentation as an opportunity to obtain useful feedback from the lecturer and peers to guide your written report. You will be allocated a maximum of 15 minutes for the presentation. Note with this time limit it will not be possible to present all the findings in the paper, and it is therefore important to be selective as to which information you include in the presentation. For Presentation 1 you should choose an empirical paper that estimates a parameter of interest in behavioural economics. For presentation 2 you should choose an empirical paper which estimates the “causal” effect of a variable on an outcome using microeconomic data.

Below are some points that your presentation should contain:

•    Motivation/background – what is the research question? Why is it

important/interesting? (You might want to include why you chose this paper)

•    How is this paper situated in the related literature?

•   What do the authors do (e.g. what is the theoretical/empirical approach, the data used (if applicable))

•   What are the main findings of the paper? Is the robustness of these findings explored – if so, how?

•   What are the strengths and the limitations of the paper?

•    How might you extend the work of the authors?

You should compile a set of slides to accompany your talk, which you should submit in the assessment area on Moodle. Be prepared to receive and discuss questions from the audience – however it is your responsibility to ensure that you have finished your presentation in the allotted time.

Guidelines on writing an extended referee report

Below are some general points a referee report comprises. You are welcome to expand this list as you see fit and add other points to your report. Consider this as a minimal list.

•   A summary of the paper and the main results. You can consider the following questions for this part.

o What is the research question?

o What is the model/setting?

o What are the main findings of the paper? How do the authors get there? With experiments? Theory? Empirical analysis? A combination of these?

•   The paper’s core contribution.

o Give your opinion on the level of interest and novelty of the work

o Is the research important? Do the authors explain why it is important or how it advances our understanding of the field?

o Is the work original? Does it contain new material?

o Is this only an incremental advance over previous work?

•   The strengths and weaknesses of the paper

o Is the method they used appropriate for the research question? Do you think they could have used another method instead of or in addition to the one

they used? Why?

o Does the conclusion summarize what has been learned and why it is interesting and useful?

o What are the limitations of the paper? These could be data, identification strategy, research design/experimental design. Are the results generalisable?

•   Suggestions for improvement/Directions for further research

o Any changes that you feel should be made in the paper?

More specific guidelines:

•   Your extended referee report should include, at a minimum, a critical overview of

the original paper, one table of replicated results with commentary on any differences between your replicated results and the results presented in the article, the rationale behind your chosen extension, one table of extended analysis and a critical discussion on whether your extended analysis supports or contradicts the original findings.

•    For reports on a paper from the first half of the course - you should clearly state what the departure from the theory is, based on the rational individual paradigm.

For reports on a paper from the second half of the course you should discuss the identification strategy used in the analysis.

•    Replicate what you believe are the main results of the paper. And, if your replication leads to different estimates or standard errors than in the published article, try to find out why.

•    Extend the analysis of the article in one way. For example:

•    For papers estimating a parameter of interest in behavioural economics:

o If feasible provide a detailed analysis with an alternative explanation of

the bias observed and show the validity of this new explanation (i.e. the   results hold only for a particular subgroup, is (not) robust to the inclusion of another variable, add an interacted term, etc.).

o Otherwise, you can suggest a new way of testing this or alternative

explanations. What methods will be used? If primary data analysis you should describe the experiment, you propose to undertake in detail. If secondary data analysis you should describe the data required to undertake the research and the econometric methodology

•    For papers estimating a causal effect:

o Perform. a sub-analysis that is not presented in the article (e.g. gender, ethnicity, time-period etc)

o Perform. a robustness check not considered in the article (e.g. are the

estimates robust to the inclusion (or omission) of subsets of control variables or different trend polynomials).

o Perform. the analysis using a different identification strategy/estimation method than that used in the article.

•   You should create formatted tables/graphs of your output to be included in your referee report.

•   You are advised to choose an article where the authors have either made their data available, or where the article contains sufficient detail to allow you to reconstruct   the dataset yourself.

•   You can also use the codes (i.e. the Stata do file) created by the author of the paper.

•    Most of the best economic journals have a section of their website dedicated to

storing data of published articles. For example, check the American Economic

Association (AER, AEJ), Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Journal of

Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, among other. Often the data is made available as “supplementary materials” .