How to Write a Research Hypothesis Paper Assignment

Assignment Task

The research paper should follow the basic elements of a novel research project, in that it should address a specific research question, briefly identify the theoretical contribution, provide testable hypotheses, and implement a suitable design based on one of the methods that we study in the course.

The goal here is to put one of the methodological approaches we study on this course in to practice. Your paper must implement at least one of the following: experiments, matching, regression, regression discontinuity, difference-in-differences/fixed effects, synthetic control, or instrumental variables. Which approach you choose should be guided by a) your research question, and b) the type of data that is available to you. For instance, it is unrealistic to think that you will be able to design, pay for, run and analyse a field experiment over the next ten weeks.

Introduction/Research question statement

This section of the paper should be used to introduce the main topic that you will be addressing, and the central research question that you will be aiming to answer. It will be helpful to be very precise here as to the causal relationship of interest (e.g. “In this research paper I assess the causal impact of D on Y”). You should also very briefly locate your study in the existing literature.

Description of Methodology

In this section of the paper you should explain the methodological approach you are taking, what assumptions it relies on, how it helps to overcome difficulties in making causal inferences in your setting, and so on.

Description of data

You need to clearly and concisely describe the data you will use to implement your design. You should say where the data comes from. This section is also the place to to discuss the scope of the study: are you focusing on a particular country/set of countries? What is the scope of the analysis? You may also wish to include some descriptive statistics of the key variables in your data.

Discussion

What have we learned from your paper? What are the limitations of the analysis?

Advice on Data

For your project, you will need to assemble a dataset to which you can apply one of the methods that we cover during the term. We say assemble because we do not expect you to spend many days and weeks painstakingly collecting a huge amount of new data. Instead, you should think whether you can use a dataset.

Questions:

1. What is the unit of analysis that I am going to be working with?

2. What is the outcome variable of my analysis?

3. What is the treatment variable in my analysis?

4. Do I need data on these variables over time?

Data Resources

A good new resource for finding datasets is the Google Dataset Search website. Here you can enter a search term for the type of data you are looking for and Google will return to you some possibilities. This may be a good way to start looking for data.

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