Term Paper Assignment
You will create this assignment following the Assignment Detail instructions below. This term paper assignment will be submitted at the end of the semester.
Assignment Details
You have been asked to research about an area of economic concern in Houston, Texas in the United States.
Select Houston, Texas city to research.
Research data sets for the one economic concern within the city that you have chosen.
Write 3-page, and answer the following questions:
What are the relationships between the economic concern you selected and that specific City’s economy?
Support your discussion of the trends with statistical evidence.
Use graphs and/or data tables of the variables you chose in the discussion.
What trends do you see in the data sets? Please explain.
Cite all of your sources and include a reference list
Utilize credible sources to support the arguments presented in the paper. Make sure you cite appropriately within your paper and list the reference(s) in APA format on your Reference page. Your paper should be at least 3 pages in length, not counting the Title page and Reference page. In accordance with APA formatting requirement, it should be double-spaced and include a running head and page numbers.
The Paper should address the following points.
The paper should clearly identify the city and economic concern in the abstract and introduction.
The following sections should identify, describe and explain the importance of the economic concern within the city’s economy.
The paper should include quantitative information in the form of tables or graphs, and describe the content of the graphs or tables. The content of those graphs or tables should directly relevant to the rest of the discussion in the paper.
The flow of the discussion in the paper ought to follow a logical sequence of some sort.
List their sources in a reference page. They should provide at least two, preferably more, credible sources of information.
Formatting:
The paper should be 3 pages in length, exclusive of the title and reference pages. The paper should have 12 point font with once inch margins and double spaced.
The better papers will include an abstract, separate introduction, summary or conclusions section, as well as section headers and page numbers.
The student’s writing should be clear and free of grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.
The information sources should be identified, properly cited and referenced using APA Style
Structure of the Paper
Below is a framework for writing an empirical paper, though the steps can be modified to write any of the other types of term papers you might encounter in the discipline.
I. Introduction
A. Statement of the topic and question to be analyzed
Once you have selected a topic you should be able to state it in the form of a question that your paper seeks to provide an answer to.
B. Rationale for the choice of topic
It is important to tell the reader why you chose this topic and what makes it interesting.
C. Organization of the remainder of the paper
Outline what will be covered in the following sections of the paper to provide the reader a roadmap of the author’s arguments.
II. Body of the Paper (inclusion of these subparts and the length of each depends on the type of paper)
A. Presentation of related literature
A literature review summarizes the views of other scholars who have written on this
topic. The literature review will allow you to demonstrate how other scholars have
approached the topic and indicates a gap in this literature that you seek to fill. The length of the literature review depends on the type of term paper you are writing and the amount of work already written on your topic.
B. Application of Economic Theory
You should present the economic model/theory on which your paper is based. You must display mastery of the material covered in class as well as appropriate usage of economic theory. This does not mean that you have to develop your own mathematical model. Instead, it serves as a means to demonstrate that your ideas are grounded in economic theory.
C. Analysis of Data
Firstly, provide a description of your data, including a discussion of how the variables for your empirical model are constructed and the sources of all your data. Second, you should provide summary statistics on the relevant variables in a table either in the body of the paper or in an appendix. In the body of the paper you should include a presentation of the results of your empirical analysis and provide a careful interpretation of your findings. Your empirical analysis might entail regression (if you are familiar with econometric methods), a simple statistical analysis of the data, or even the use of graphs and charts to effectively display interesting features of the data that help support the
arguments made in the paper.
III. Conclusion
While concluding the paper, you should restate the objective of the paper. Following
this, you should provide your conclusions taking care to distinguish your contribution
from the existing literature on the topic.
IV. References
A. News Articles versus Scholarly References:
You may certainly read sources like The New York Times and The Economist in order to do some background reading on a policy issue. However, these sources are not peer-reviewed and therefore are not suitable for a research paper. EconLit, an online database for economics journal articles and books, is an excellent point from which to initiate a search for scholarly literature. This and other literature databases are available through the Penrose library website. Note that it is not appropriate to use open-source online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.
B. Formatting of References (plus information on parenthetical citations and footnotes):
Economics journals typically require a documentation style that combines parenthetical citations with the so-called Chicago/Turabian format for references and footnotes, and this is what we require for your papers. The parenthetical citations provide limited information about your sources and complete bibliographic information about each source is provided in a separate references page. Footnotes are used to incorporate additional material that is pertinent but supplemental to the statements presented in the text. This is nicely described in Reed College’s “Citation Style for Papers and Theses in Economics” (Parker Undated). Additional information about the format of references for print and internet sources can be found at the University of Wisconsin’s Writing Center’s Writer’s Handbook website (2006, “Chicago/Turabian Documentation: Works Cited Page”) and at the Online! website (Harnack and Kleppinger, 2003, Section 7c).