14.661A students draft an essay reviewing, replicating, and extending an empirical study chosen from the 14.661 reading list. Please choose a paper not covered in detail in class.
The instructors must approve your selection by the day after class session 12. The essay is due on the Friday before the last day of class.
Hints
Polish your writing skills now rather than in the summer before you go on the job market. Learn to tell stories with numbers by imitating the good work of others.
Your essay should run to roughly 2000 words and have three components, outlined below.
A. Overview
1. What question does the study ask, and why is this of economic interest? What are the most important findings in the paper?
2. Describe an ideal empirical strategy for the question at hand. Is the question of interest causal or descriptive? If the former, which assumptions support a causal interpretation of the results presented in your chosen paper? Are the econometric techniques used in the study likely to yield estimates with a causal interpretation? Are the results convincing?
4. Discuss this paper’s place in the academic literature. What were the findings at the time the paper was written? What is this paper’s contribution? Are the paper’s findings still relevant, or have they been superseded or overturned?
B. Replication
Identify the main findings and use the authors’ data to replicate the published findings if possible. If the data are unavailable, construct comparable estimates using a data set of your choosing. (Choose data you’d expect to generate similar results.)
Summarize and compare your replication results to the original results, with original and replication results reported side by side. Highlight any differences. Explain why you think your results differ from the original (if they do).
C. Extension
Extend the empirical work in your paper by doing one of the following:
(a) Estimating alternative specifications that may illuminate issues and questions raised by the paper (e.g., specification checks or subsamples of special interest).
(b) Collecting new data and producing results for this new sample.
Your extension should include specification checks of the sort you expect to see in a published empirical study of this nature. How does your extension add to the paper’s original findings?
