Aims: You will experience what it means to undertake an independent research project, from finding and formulating a proper research question, searching and...

Economics Independent Research Project (ECON0042)

Aims: You will experience what it means to undertake an independent research project, from finding and formulating a proper research question, searching and identifying useful, academic, literature and properly summarizing the current state of your subject area before attempting to answer your research question on the basis of literature and your own analysis. Projects can be empirical, theoretical, data-driven, literature-driven and interdisciplinary, and you will be guided to also identify and contact experts in the field of your topic.



Objectives:

To undertake a significant piece of independent research work;
 To gain experience in reading, processing and summarizing a significant amount of literature on a specialised aspect of Economics;
 To gain practical experience in formulating research questions and refining these on the basis of relevant literature, data and discussions with fellow students and supervisor(s); 
 To gain experience in finding and analysing data and/or using, developing and validating and estimating models;
 To report about individual work in “work-in-progress” presentations in the bi-weekly Thesis Seminar;
 To report about the research work in writing in a thesis of around 4500 words.
Suitable for: Final year single-honours Economics (L100 and  L101) students only. Cannot be taken with ECON0117: Economics UG Research Dissertation. Open to Joint-Degree students only with explicit permission of their home department. Not open to Affiliate students.



Prerequisites: Students must have completed the first two years of their single- or joint-honours undergraduate degrees.



Assumed knowledge: Students coming into the module should have a good understanding of economics theory (both microeconomics and macroeconomics) as well as good essay writing and presentation skills.