Final Project

1 Assignment Submission

• Submit a pdf of the presentation on Canvas
  • by 9:00 am on April 17, so I can have them all loaded before class!
• Submit the URL of your Github repository on Canvas

2 Task

The overarching goal of this course is to learn and practice skills you will use in academic economic research. To that end, the final project asks you to:

• Propose a question in economics you want to study
• Start a project using R and Github that tries to answer that question

There is obviously not enough time to in the semester to complete a research project (these often take multiple years). Your task is to begin a project. This will likely include gathering some data, cleaning it, making a few interesting figures, and potentially running some regressions or other analysis.

3 Proposal

Due: March 22

• Submit 1 paragraph (or a few bullet points) proposal of your research project on Canvas

This proposal should outline the scope of your project. Describe the data sources you plan to use and any analysis you plan to run. Note any major tasks (like hard to gather data, new methods to learn) that you will have to tackle.

The TA and I will read the proposals and comment on each. We will let you know if we think you should adjust your project goals.

4 Project Requirements

This is a very open-ended final project, but there are some specific requirements for the structure of your project.

• code in R
  • using renv to manage your packages
• stored in a repository on Github
  • make sure to have a clear and useful commit history
• a Readme file (in markdown) describing how to run your code and recreate your results
• a clear project structure and filenames
  • including a “main.R” script that runs all of your analysis
• at least one unit test
  • and that your project passes it
• at least one figure
  • you can use ggplot2 or another R package

I encourage but do not require you to use the following topics we have discussed:

• APIs
  • if one exists for your data
• Github Actions
  • for running “main.r”
  • for running your unit tests
• Github Projects
  • for organizing your tasks
• Branches
  • for new features

5 Replication

After all final projects are submitted, your repository will be assigned to one of your classmates who will then read your documentation, try to replicate your output, and make suggestions for improvement.

So make sure to write clear documentation and that your output can be recreated from your repository.

6 Presentation Requirements

We will have three in-class days for presentations.

• Each presentation should aim to be 10 minutes in length
  • There will be about 5 minutes for questions
• This implies having only 5-7 slides

Your presentation should tell us…

• Your research question
• How you decided to answer it (your data, methods, etc.)
• What answer (or preview of answers) you got
  • include your figure!