Holly Wang Workshop at CAU December 15, 2010

1. Conducting Empirical Research and Publishing in International Journals Holly Wang Workshop at CAU December 15, 2010

2. Procedures of Conducting Empirical Research • Choose your topic • Build a team • Review literature • Economic models • Collect and clean data • Econometric method • Analyze • Write papers Grant proposal

3. Choose Your Topic • What is the hot topic currently? • Funding availability • Easiness in publishing • Time lag • Is it important over the long run or just a fad? • What is your personal interest? • Motivated • Have background knowledge • Future career • Define the right scope of the topic • Do you have the capacity to handle it? • Do you have the time and resource to handle it?

4. Build A Team • Advisor: if you are a student • Is s/he the expert for the chosen topic? • Will s/he be able to give you enough time? • Is his/her advising style match your need? • Team members • Need one expert to cover each aspect of the project: economic model, econometric methods, field knowledge, policy knowledge, data collection resource • Willing to share the resource and credit • Have a clear role for each team member

5. Literature Review • Searching engine: • google scholar, econlit, etc. • Background and situation: • eg, GDP, and other statistics • Issues: • papers of similar topics: what have been done, and what have not been studied • identify gaps in literature • specific objectives to fill the gaps • Methods • papers with relevant methods that can be used

6. Economic Models • Microeconomic theory • supply theory, demand theory, derived demand • imperfect competition and game theory • general equilibrium and trade theory • Macroeconomic theory • growth model • Structure model vs reduced form • Variable selection suggested by the theory • Shifters, especially demographic variables • Testable hypothesis

7. Data • Based on theory, identify variables needed • Cross section vs time series • Location, size, time horizon • How aggregated • Survey design vs published data • Focus group • Random sampling • Data clean up

8. Econometric methods • Least square based regression • Tobit model for truncated data • Logit/Probit for qualitative dependent variables • Equation systems: SURE • Maximum loglikelihood estimation • Nonparametric

9. Analyze • Diagnose tests • Try alternative models specifications • Hypothesis • Results shall address the objectives • Explain results and compare with intuition

10. Paper Writing • Make a title to be concise and specific • Key words and abstract • Select a journal • Read a couple of recent issues • The topic is accepted by the journal • Impact factor, fees, fast review • Cite articles from the journal • Formatting for the journal • Submit

11. Paper Structure • Introduction (including background, literature review, objectives) • Model (theory) • Data (explain data collection methods, and variables, descriptive statistics) • Results • Conclusion (policy implication)