The actual "doing" of economics after graduate school almost always involves the writing of research proposals. In academe, these may be proposals that will compete for funding in the regular cycle at one of the major government granting agencies. In consulting, the same sort of exercise must be undertaken when bidding on a research contract (either for the government, or for litigation support). In government, nothing gets done without several layers of administrators wanting to "approve" what you do, so a project must also be sold effectively there. Since there is not enough time during the quarter to require the execution of an entire term paper, you will be asked to do just part of the task. Sometimes this is the hardest (although not the most time-consuming) part of a research project.
Twice during the quarter, you will assemble a research "proposal" in the field of Natural Resource Economics. How do you get ideas for this? You may perceive some overly restrictive assumptions in the theoretical models presented in the lecture or in the readings. You might have already been thinking about a particular natural resource problem encountered in your own experience (either as a citizen or as an economist). You may have an avocation in environmental advocacy that has led you to encounter assertions that merit testing. Or, you may need to delve into the sorts of things other natural resource economists have been worrying about in recent years to become acquainted with the types of problems that may benefit from your inquiry.
Before considering what might constitute the right scope for a proposal, keep in mind the sort of document you will be preparing. To keep you from getting carried away, and to encourage succinctness, your submission should be no longer than roughly 1000-1500 words (the equivalent of about 4-6 double-spaced, typewritten pages). Your proposal should be prepared in paragraph form and should be arranged roughly into the following sub-sections:
TITLE: Informative and to the point. Avoid gimmicky titles until you are famous.
NAME and AFFILIATION: Never propose a research idea without staking a claim to the intellectual property rights!
ABSTRACT: This single paragraph is the "advertisement" for your proposed project. It is a challenge, but you should be able to condense your proposal into a maximum of 150 words that summarize the gist of your proposal. Upon reading the abstract, people should know what your project will try to do, and how you will be doing it. The audience for this proposal will consist of two main groups: (i.) the "review panel" consisting of other economists with at least your level of familiarity with economic theory and econometrics who will pass judgment on its technical merits (perhaps only a subset of this group will be specialists in natural resources); and (ii.) the well- educated non-economist administrators of the agency (or company, or litigation team) who make the final decision on whether or not you get the money to do the project. They need to be assured that this is the right project to spend money on.
INTRODUCTION: What is the main question that the proposed research will attempt to answer? What innovations will your research offer, relative to existing research? (Be VERY clear about this.) Who will be interested in the answer, and why (i.e. what is the constituency for this research)?
MODEL OR SPECIFICATION: What sort of economic/econometric model would you utilize? For the theortical portion of the proposal, give strong intuition why the new approach or generalization that you propose will potentially make a difference for the implications of theory for policy-making. For the empirical work, does economic theory to guide your specifications? What are your expectations about the signs of the crucial coefficients, ex ante? What would be the interpretations of the more interesting coefficients? What specific hypotheses would you plan to test? If any important variables are fundamentally unmeasurable, how might they be correlated with things that are included in your model, and how might this affect the results? Will you have to worry about endogeneity in your model?
DATA: What sort of data will you require (i.e. which variables? what would constitute an observation)? Are these data are readily available? Or, can the necessary data conceivably be assembled? Are there any variables which would have to be proxied, and by what? If your model must be calibrated, what sources will provide values for the relevant parameters.
FORECASTING AND/OR COUNTERFACTUAL SIMULATIONS: Once your model is estimated or calibrated using the actual data or empirical results from other studies, how could it be used to predict what will happen, or what might have happened, if circumstances are (or were) different. Are there any socially or politically interesting scenarios your model could be used to simulate? Are there "policy" implications to be drawn from your calibrated model?
ANTICIPATED DELIVERABLES: If everything works out as planned, what do we stand to learn from your proposed project that we didn't know before? What will your model be able to do for society? One would hope that these new insights are worth as much to society as the opportunity cost of doing the research. Can you persuade the potential sponsor (the "granting agency", or "your boss") that she should "fund" your project? Where do you expect to publish the main findings from your project? (It helps to be able to name specific journals that might welcome your results.)
REFERENCES: If applicable, the full citations (in standard form) for any sources mentioned in the proposal. All references must be cited somewhere in the body of the proposal. The references often provide reviewers with an indication of the degree of your familiarity with the literature. If you overlook crucial citations in the literature, it can doom your research proposal's chances for funding (especially if some of the key work has been done by a member of the review panel or one of the "mail" reviewers). In the course of the review process for journals, editors frequently identify appropriate reviewers for manuscripts by entering the topic(s) covered by the paper into ECONLIT to see who has been working in the area recently.
BUDGET: Now is the time to get started thinking about how to budget for research. After all, your effective wage will be determined by how many hours it actually takes to complete a project, not by the number of hours that are funded. It is not permissible to fail to deliver the product because it cost more than you expected. Thinking about the tractability of your proposed research is vital. Reviewers are almost always asked to evaluate the qualifications of the proposer to complete the described project; they are also asked whether the budget is "reasonable" and commensurate with the scope of the proposal. Things you should be sure to include are:
This is always a useful exercise, because you can be sure the administrators will be looking at your bottom line and weighing it against the apparent social (or private) benefits anticipated from your project. Keep in mind that some projects get funded because they are "small," in that the total funding budget covers, say, six "big" projects, but not seven. The remainder needs to be spent, or it will revert back to the source, so the ranked list is scanned for the highest ranked "acceptable" project for the amount that will just exhaust the total budget. In fact, a modest but very interesting proposal is sometimes the best way to break into a funding source.
STYLE: The body of the proposal can be arranged into sub- sections with the headings indicated above, but the prose should flow smoothly. Each section should consist of a few paragraphs which, collectively, address at least the questions noted in these guidelines.
Most students who have made it as far as graduate school know how to prepare a "research document," but just in case, here are a couple of reminders: Avoid cute plastic binders, colored paper or other clever disguises for your proposal. No extra points will be awarded for fancy fonts. The content of your proposal is all that matters. Its presentation should be professional. The abstract should be single-spaced, and the references may be single-spaced if there are a lot of them. The body of the proposal must be double-spaced (not space-and- a-half). Fasten with a single staple in the upper left hand corner.
SUGGESTIONS: If you are having trouble getting started with an idea, you can easily explore the existing literature using the ECONLIT data base available over the Internet (WebSPIRS). Perhaps a model similar to someone else's could be tested on a different set of data, or the model could be elaborated or changed in some way. If you choose to take this route, identify clearly the citation(s) for the source of your idea and proceed.
Alternately, good research ideas sometimes come with the discovery of a very interesting data set. Exploration of the web sites in the Collection of Links for this course may spark an idea.
Databases similar to ECONLIT are available for other social sciences (SOCIOFIL or PSYCLIT) and can be accessed via Social Sciences Computing's F:> drive, although you may not be able to get the most recent versions of these. The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) can also provide ideas. Often there are interesting questions being addressed in other social science disciplines that economists have not even thought about asking yet.
Submit each of your proposals in quadruplicate (4 complete copies). A real granting agency might ask for a dozen copies! Three copies of your proposal will be assigned (anonymously) to your classmates. In as much of a "double-blind" fashion as can be achieved in such a small class, each of your proposals will be read by three "reviewers" and the professor. We will prepare written criticisms for each proposal (instructions to follow). Evaluation will be based on the overall assessment by all readers, with a proportionally greater weight on the judgment of the professor.
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