Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 2.5 hours / session

Course Description and Prerequisites

This course will guide students through the process of forming economic hypotheses, gathering the appropriate data, analyzing them, and effectively communicating their results. All students will be expected to have successfully completed 14.30 and 14.32 (or their equivalents) as well as courses in basic microeconomics and macroeconomics. Students may find it useful to take at least one economics field course and perform a UROP before taking this course, but these are not requirements.

Requirements

Your grade will be based on full participation in all aspects of the course.

There will be no exams, and nothing will be due during finals week.

For the small paper, you will be given the choice of three topics on which to write a 6-8 page report. We will provide data sets and suggested techniques for each of the three choices. The main project will be a 10-12 page written report based on original economic research that you perform over the course of the semester. In addition to handing in the report at the end of the semester, you will be required to deliver a 5-10 minute presentation to the class on your preliminary idea, hand in a one page written proposal, hand in a rough draft, and deliver a 15-20 minute presentation to the class on your research near the end of the semester.

14.33 Policies

1. You are permitted, in fact encouraged, to discuss all course material with other students in the class. However, you must, obviously, hand in your own individual small paper and project. Discussion with others is intended to clarify ideas, concepts, and technical questions, not to derive group papers.
2. In fairness to students who complete assignments on time, students failing to hand in the small paper or the proposal on time will receive a zero for that assignment. We will accept late final projects, but their grades will be penalized a half a letter grade a day for lateness. You may turn in assignments during lecture on the day they are due, if there is a lecture.
3. Cheating or academic dishonesty in any form will not be tolerated and will result in swift punitive action. This includes but is not restricted to copying material from other students, lying, or plagiarizing from any source. See Citing and Using Sources for clarification on what constitutes plagiarism. Any student found to have cheated or behaved unethically or dishonestly will be given a grade of F on the assignment involved and referred to the appropriate disciplinary committees within MIT for further action.