Reference no: EM131950325 , Length: 15

Topic: Impact of rising gasoline prices on US public transit Ridership?

Your task is to formulate a research question, define a regression model to answer the question, collect data to run the model and write a paper summarizing what you have done and present your results. Do not choose a fuzzy research question such as "what are the determinants of Y" (if you do, you need to provide a motivation to why this is important). A better choice is to ask "what is the causal effect of X on Y" for some specific independent variable. You do not necessarily have to answer that question but you should make an attempt. You do not have to come up with a completely original research idea but you can replicate an existing paper using new data or use existing data to slightly tweak an existing research question.

Your term paper should be around 10-15 pages, Things that are essential to address are specification of functional form, potential omitted variable bias and other things that we have talked about during the course. You should show a clear understanding of causality problems in econometrics.

1. The first section should be an introduction where you clearly state your research question and why it is interesting.

2. The second section should contain a description of your identification strategy and a description and motivation of your specified regression model. Are you using panel data? Fixed Effects? Instrumental Variables? A randomized experiment? Motivate your choice. If you use standard OLS on non-experimental cross-section data (which is fine), make sure that you included a very thorough discussion of causality problems in your estimation and describe the strategy that you would like to apply if you had access to more data.

3. The third section should be a detailed description of your data, where you have obtained it and also descriptive statistics.

4. The fourth section should contain your regression results and interpretations. Don't forget to discuss both statistical and economic significance.

5. The fifth section should be a discussion on how it would be possible to improve the paper. You may refer to the results of other papers that deal with similar research questions. Be open about the weaknesses of your paper, I do not expect you to write a publishable paper in these few weeks. To show that you have understood the course material you should be able to understand the shortcomings of your paper.

Attachment:- Assignment File.rar