Assignment
RELATE GROWTH (DEPENDENT VARIABLE) AND EDUCATION
Instructions
This is a group assignment (up to 3 people per group). Group members will receive identical marks for the assignment. Only one copy of the assignment should be submitted per group. A link to the FBE cover sheet is provided under the "Assignment" heading on iLearn. Fill in the details of the cover sheet and staple it to the front of your assignment.
Assignment Task
Choose a topic of interest, collect relevant data, and analyse it using the methods studied in Econ634 and/or other statistics/econometrics methods.
Write up your findings in a research report style Word document (not longer than 10 pages using 1.15 line spacing) containing the following sections:
1. Introduction
- Describe what you are doing and why it is important
2. Literature Review
- find 4-5 papers on the topic and describe:
i.How their study relates to your assignment
ii. What data they use
iii. Empirical method (statistical method used for the analysis of data)
iv. Findings
Best resource to use is google scholar
3. Dataset
Find data to analyse - probably from www.rfe.org
ii. Describe the data, perhaps in a table, summary statistics- average, variance, skews. Also use charts.
iii. Explain where the data comes from
4. Econometric Methodology
we haven't done a whole lot of this yet
i. Tests on the data, hypothesis testing
ii. OLS - Ordinary least squares - most people use this one
5. Empirical Findings
present results of the analysis
- discuss possible implications
- could discuss how results compare with previous studies in literature
6. Conclusions
- summary of what you've done
7. References
Make sure that any equations you may have are typed in an equation editor.
Give a 15 minute Powerpoint presentation (worth 25% of the Assignment mark) on
• why we should care about your topic;
• what dataset you used and what challenges/problems you encountered with it;
• what statistical/econometric methods you used in your project;
• what your findings are;
• implications of your results.
Tips for finding free data
• An excellent starting point is the Resources for Economists Data Links - www. rfe.org. From this site you can find almost every publically available economic data set.
• finance.yahoo.com
• rba.gov.au
• google.com
• Macquarie University Library
• etc