Based on the article below state the main points. It is fine to use bullets and

Question

Based on the article below state the main points.  It is fine to use bullets and to use the authors words without rephrasing.

The term paper

You have chosen your topic, done your research, and settled on your ideas, and now you have to write the paper. If you have done your job properly up to now, you should have a topic, some data, and plenty of notes on things you have read. Now your task is to decide how to focus your question and ideas, assemble the pieces into a structure that hangs together, and present an argument others will find persuasive. Remember: writing is a process. Start with a few lines, perhaps just section headings, and then build up detail and flesh out your analysis. The key to the process is not to become too rigid too soon. While you want enough structure to get started, you also want to allow the overall shape of your paper to evolve somewhat along the way.

OUTLINING YOUR PAPER The outline for your term paper is the agenda you set for the things you want to accomplish. A good term paper will ask an interesting question and offer a plausible answer. No matter what your field or topic, there is a fairly standard set of things you want to accomplish in the paper: INTRODUCTION pose an interesting question or problem LITERATURE REVIEW survey the literature on your topic METHODS/DATA formulate your hypothesis and describe your data RESULTS present your results with the help of graphs and charts DISCUSSION critique your method and/or discuss any policy implications CONCLUSIONS summarize what you have done; pose questions for further research.

WRITING YOUR LITERATURE REVIEW You should have notes, either on index cards or in files on your computer, on the books and articles you have read. Read over your summaries and comments and begin to look for common themes that can organize your review. What is the main point of the article, and how does it relate to your topic? Do other authors offer a similar position? An opposing one? As you think through these questions, keep in mind that the literature review has two functions. The first is simply to demonstrate your familiarity with scholarly work on your topic – to provide a survey of what you have read, trace the development of important themes, and draw out any tensions in prior research. The second function is to lay the foundations for your paper, to provide motivation. The particular issues you intend to raise, the terms you will employ, and the approach you will take should be defined with reference to previous scholarly works.

PRESENTING YOUR HYPOTHESIS The literature review sets out the issues that motivate your paper and demonstrates your familiarity with what others have written on the topic. The next step is to formulate a specific questions, problem, or conjecture, and to describe the approach you will take to answer, solve, or test it. Often, this will take the form of an empirical hypothesis: “social security depresses personal savings”; “high levels of employment are related to high levels of inflation,” etc. An empirical hypothesis makes a claim about how some part of the economy works and can be assessed by analyzing the relevant data. In presenting your hypothesis, you need to discuss the data set you are using and, in most cases, the type of regression you will run. You should say where you found the data, and use a table, graph, or simple statistics to summarize them. You should explain how the data relate to your hypothesis and note any problems they pose. If you have only a small set of observations, or have to use proxies for data you cannot directly observe, you should explicitly acknowledge this. In a term paper, it may not be possible to reach conclusive empirical results. You may have incomplete data, or your regression coefficients may not be significant, or you may not have controlled for significantly all the factors involved. It is better to acknowledge these shortcomings than to make overly broad and unsupported statements.

PRESENTING YOUR RESULTS One of the more common mistakes made by authors of economic papers is to forget that their results need to be written up as carefully and clearly as any other part of the paper. There are essentially two decisions to make. First, how many empirical results should be presented? Second, how should these results be described in the text? How many results should I report? Less is usually more. A common mistake made by virtually all novice researchers (including graduate students) is to include every parameter estimate from every regression specification that was run. Such a “kitchen sink” approach is usually taken to show the world that the researcher has been careful and done a lot of work and that the main results of the paper are not sensitive to the choice of sample period, minor changes in the list of regressors, etc. However, pages of parameter estimates usually muddy the message of the paper. The reader will get either lost or bored. A good general rule is to present only those parameter estimates that speak directly to your topic.

FOR EXAMPLE Suppose you are writing about the effect of education on wages. Your main regression places an individual’s wage on the left-hand side and regressors such as education, race, gender, seniority at the individual’s job, labor market experience, and state of residence on the right hand side. You believe that the regressor of interest (education) is correlated with the error term of the wage equation – more “able” people earn more at their jobs, i.e. have a high residual in the wage equation, and also obtain more education. Because of this correlation between the error term and education, the measured effect of education in the regression will reflect not only the true causal effect of education on wages but also some of the effect of ability on wages. To circumvent this “ability bias” you use a separate measure as a proxy for ability. Though such a proxy is probably not available, assume for the sake of exposition that a special dataset contains an individual’s evaluation by his or her second grade teacher. When presenting your results you want to focus only on the estimates of the education effect and the ability effect. Note that the table does not present the parameter estimates of your control variables, regressors such as marital status and seniority, but presents any detail that helps interpret the parameters of interest (including the identification of the dependent variable, which is annoyingly left off of many tables).  The notes to your table should be extensive enough so that the reader does not have to look back at the text to understand what is being presented. The cardinal sin, to be avoided at all costs, is to report your estimates in terms of “” or “” (the actual Greek letters from your equations) without stating what these coefficients mean. Using eight-letter abbreviations from your Stata or SAS program (YEDUCT1 or ABIL25A) is not much better.  You should present enough information in total so that a researcher could replicate your results. For very detailed projects, this may require a data appendix. Finally, the notes to the table should indicate whether you are reporting standard errors or t-statistics in the parentheses underneath the coefficients. Both are seen in the literature, so you must be clear which you are using. As a general rule, it is better to report standard errors. That way, your readers can more easily choose the statistical method they would like to use in evaluating your numbers. After presenting these results you may want to discuss any additional robustness checks that you performed. The third and fourth columns of Table I are robustness checks of sorts; they show that the effect of including ability in the regression is the same whether or not we include state level dummy variables. We may also have checked whether the estimate of the education effect is lower when ability is included, if we subset only on male household heads or if we restrict the sample to the 1990s. Sometimes all that is necessary is to let the reader know in the text that you performed these tests and that the main results were unaffected. For a single robustness check, this information can even appear in a footnote keyed to the relevant portion of the text. If there are many robustness checks however, you may want to present these results in another, more parsimonious table.

How should I describe my empirical results in the text? After you decide how to make your tables, graphs, and figures, you should clearly and precisely describe them in the text. Establish the main point of the table in the topic sentence of a paragraph. For example, you can describe the above table like this: Table I shows that including a measure of ability in the wage equation dramatically lowers the predicted effect of education on earnings. Column 1 does not include an ability measure and indicates that a year of education raises wages by 9.1 percent. Column 2 adds the ability measure and the education effect drops to 3.1 percent. Columns 3 and 4 show that this general pattern is repeated even when state level dummy variables are included. The estimates in Table I are therefore consistent with the hypothesis that the OLS estimates suffer from an upward ability bias. Note that the first and last sentences in this paragraph are “big picture” statements, describing how the results in this table fit into the overall theme of the paper. Too often, authors do not pay close attention to the paragraphs that describe their results. The results are already in the table. What difference does it make how they are described in the text? The reason to craft these descriptive paragraphs carefully is that any well-designed empirical project is complex; a lot of factors must be considered in order for any single factor to be precisely estimated. You want to guide the reader and focus his or her attention on the important parts of the table, and in the right order. Moreover, no empirical paper turns out perfectly. Usually the data do not resoundingly support each and every idea. In these cases, it is crucial to discuss your results as honestly and carefully as possible.

FOR EXAMPLE Assume that you are studying the effect of the population share of lawyers in a city on the subsequent growth rate of that city. Your theory says that cities with lots of lawyers will grow more slowly than other cities, but the same is not true of cities with lots of other highly educated professionals, such as doctors. You get data on the population percentage of both doctors and lawyers in 25 cities in 1950 and on the growth rates of these cities as well as the Census region for each city (Mountain, Pacific, Mid-Atlantic, etc.) from 1950 to 1990. Your regression places the 1950–1990 growth rate of the city on the left hand side; the regressor of interest is the “lawyer share” of population. A bad way to write up this table is: The first column of the table shows the main effect predicted by theory. The second column shows that doctors do not have the same effect on city growth. Finally, the inclusion of regional dummy variables does not significantly affect the main point estimates, though statistical precision is lost. A better way to write up the table is like this: The talbe shows that a high share of lawyers in a city’s population appears to lead to slower growth. Yet, when all the determinants of city growth (such as Census Region growth) are accounted for, the estimate of this effect becomes less precise. The first column shows that a 10 percentage-point increase in the lawyer share of population decreases the future city growth by about 0.9 percentage points. Column 2 shows that, by contrast, a high doctor share does not lead to lower growth. In fact, the point estimate for the doctor share is positive, though not statistically significant. Note however that the estimates in Column 2 are less precise than those in Table I, as the standard error for the lawyer effect rises from 0.01 to 0.03. Since the doctor and lawyer share are strongly (positively) correlated, multicollinearity reduces the precision of the regression. Statistical precision becomes even more of a concern in Column 3, when we add dummy variables for Census region. The size of the lawyer effect remains about the same (–0.07 compared with –0.09 and –0.08), but adding so many new regressors causes the standard errors to rise to the point that the lawyer effect is statistically indistinguishable from zero. The implication is that lawyers do have a negative effect on city growth but that although the point estimate is robust to the inclusion of other relevant variables it is not precisely estimated because of the small sample size.

The Bottom Line When writing up your empirical results focus only on what is important and be as clear as possible. You may feel that you are repeating yourself and that the reader may be offended at how closely you are leading him or her through your tables and graphs but, to paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, both smart and dumb readers will appreciate your pointing things out directly and clearly. The dumb readers need the help, and the smart ones will take silent pleasure in the knowledge that they did not need your assistance!

DISCUSSING YOUR RESULTS Many of the topics that interest economists have real world policy implications. Your own research may present strong findings about the effects of existing or proposed policies. While this is fine, you should not conclude that “this should be done” or “this should not be done.” You should avoid making value judgments and rely instead on economic facts and analyses. Even when you have reached your own conclusions about which policy is desirable, your reader should be able to consider the facts and make the policy decision for himself or herself. For example, you may find that substituting policy X for current policy Y would raise GDP by 2 percent. That is an appropriate conclusion in a term paper. Be careful, however, not to simply assert that policy X should be substituted for policy Y. For one thing, it can be very difficult to measure the welfare consequences of a given set of policies. Dollars and cents may be easy to measure, but individuals’ well being is not. In addition, your own research may not have accounted for certain distributional issues, legal issues, matters of national sovereignty or any number of other things that ultimately affect the desirability of a given policy. In the discussion of your result, you should also point out the limitations of your research, say the relatively small number of observations you have or the simplicity of the functional form you have tested. In an undergraduate term paper such limitations are expected. In general, it is better to show your instructor that you understand the limits of your method than make broad claims you do not support. You can also suggest questions or alternative approaches for further research. Once you have completed the discussion of your results, you can add a short conclusion summarizing what you have done. Then go back and write an introduction that provides a roadmap for the reader. If you have budgeted your time, you should have a chance to revise the paper, with the goal of achieving greater clarity. Finally, ask a friend to proofread your work. Make necessary corrections and then submit.

Explanation / Answer

The article basically talks about the whole process of doing research on your carefully researched and chosen topic . The article basically outlines the whole process of research in a series of well structured steps and hence comes as a boon to students who are just at the begining oftheir research careers.

The main points discussed in the article are:

1.The first and foremost step is choose a topic based on your interests and extensive readign about it. When reading you would have come up with numerous questions. focus on the question and read more. Once you have decided a topic, then yoy have to start writing. WRITING is a process and hence take small steps each time .

2.The important part is the create a rough outline of the paper. Based on your topic decide the structure the paper would take and how the structure can welll put forth your ideas or arguments.This is basically a content page where you explain what exactly you want to talk about and how. It would be interesting if you put up a question as this will also help cretae a hypothesis.

3.Third step is to write the literature review. When you had done research when selecting the topic you would come across various papers written buy others o this topic. Choose the most relevant ones Divide them into the ones you support and the ones you object to.Use this as a space not only to showcase your knowledge on the subject but also to encourage people to read your paper and show them that it would be interesting.

4.The next step is to present the hypothesis  and to formulate a specific questions, problem, or conjecture, and to describe the approach you will take to answer, solve, or test it. This should aslo discuss the method of data collection and why did you choose that particular method.Also talk about the exceptions or limitations of your collected data It should also contain the justification for the graphs, charts and tables you wil put up.

5.When presenting the paper the author must think about two questions:

a.How many results should I report? This involves analysing the number of variables you have taken and if all of them are relevant to your question.Single out the ones that are most likely the answer to your hypothesis and concentrate on explaining thes in detial, Other trivial variables can be left out or just mentioned in brief or you can have an appendix at the end to describe these. justify you use o fthe statistical and /or econometric tools you are using and go on to enumerate your findings thorugh visual methods like graph, chart, tables etc.

B.How should I describe my empirical results in the text? Establish the main point of the table or graph or chart in the first sentence or make it a topic.The aim is to  guide the reader and focus his or her attention on the important parts of the table, and in the right order and that too as carefully and honestly as possible.When writing up your empirical results focus only on what is important and be as clear as possible.

6.The final step is dicussing the results of your paper. Describe how the paper is empiracally suitable but one should avoid value judgments. Discuss on what your finding are but do not tell the reader as to what should be done and what should not be done. Give space for the reader to ascertain it by themselves. Also point out the limitations of ypou resseach and how this may affect your findings.

After thuis, go back and write the introduction to suit the paper. Revise the paper to achieve greater clarity.Proof read and then ask a friend to proofread the work. Make corrections,if any and then submit.

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