AREC 869P1: Agricultural and Resource Economics Dissertation Prospectus Development Course, Exams of Agricultural engineering

Download AREC 869P1: Agricultural and Resource Economics Dissertation Prospectus Development Course and more Exams Agricultural engineering in PDF only on Docsity! AREC 869P1 Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics University of Maryland Ted McConnell Fall 2007 3218 Symons Hall Purpose of Course The chief purpose of this course is to help third year students complete their dissertation prospectuses. The course will use a crude but effective grading system. Those who complete and defend their prospectus in an oral examination by May 16, 2008 will receive an A. Those who defend their oral examination by December 15, 2008 will receive a B. All others will receive a C. The letter grade of a student who does not participate fully in class meetings will be reduced accordingly. A second purpose is to help students develop professionally, learn how to identify fruitful topics, determine where they are likely to make their greatest contributions, and learn how to present and market ideas and research results effectively. Much of this will be discussed as students make their presentations. Mileposts The course has five mileposts: four installations of increasing detail and clarity on the student’s prospectus and an agreement with a faculty member to serve as advisor. Each student will make four oral presentations as well as attend all of the others’ presentations and the Departmental seminars. Students should begin at once to identify a faculty member who will serve as a prospectus and dissertation advisor. The advisor will attend the student’s last two presentations. By September 4, each student should have a faculty member who will serve as advisor. Each presentation should be accompanied by a written version of current progress on the prospectus. All students are required to attend each presentation. Under exceptional circumstances, absences may be negotiated but require careful justification. The mileposts are as follows: First Milepost for AREC 869 1. Literature Survey by Wednesday, August 29. Your first goal is to identify a topic for research. • Spend the summer browsing academic journals extensively and reading papers in the areas that interest you. • Focusing on areas that interest you, compile a list of puzzles and weaknesses in the existing literature. Look for incomplete explanations, overly restrictive models or explanations with holes. Think about empirical questions that are unanswered or not answered correctly. Where is existing knowledge incomplete in a way that you can complete? Enumerate questions that you believe are important and chart out ways that you plan to answer these questions. Researchable ideas begin in various ways. One starts with something in the literature that is incomplete, incorrect, not addressed or somehow begging for an answer. Another is to find an issue or problem in the real world that is somehow not addressed or addressed incompletely or incorrectly. The research is finding a solution. 1 Lifted from the outlines of John List and others who have taught this course. • Select one or two tentative topics for your dissertation to be reported in class. • Try out your ideas on faculty members. Don’t be discouraged by others’ lack of enthusiasm. Listen carefully to the comments of faculty and your fellow students. Try to understand the comments and to answer criticisms. Don’t jump to conclusions about criticisms. Hear them out and then respond. • Turn in your literature survey on August 29 and give a 20-minute presentation of your ideas—10 slides maximum. • There’s an art to using overheads. Before you make your presentation, be sure that your overheads are readable from the rear of the class by viewing them yourself. The overheads present the major ideas of your research. Don’t write so much on your overheads that the audience spends time reading them rather than listening to you. Bullet form is typically best. Do not use overheads that simply duplicate text. • Don’t be afraid to try out ideas. This is an exploratory stage. Listen carefully to comments and criticisms. The goal is to be helpful to one another in narrowing research topics. What is a literature survey? Introduction. The survey begins by introducing the main economic issues. Identify the basic questions and why they are important. Much of this can come from the introductions to the papers being reviewed. You may want to cite or discuss some of the broader and more classic literature underlying the specific papers being reviewed. For example, a survey of the literature on options in mortgages should not review the basic theory of option pricing models, e.g. Black- Scholes. Rather a brief section of the paper should simply alert the reader to the kind of background needed to understand the literature being reviewed and provide some citations of this background literature. How the literature has developed. A survey should be a succinct and thoughtful summary of the origin and growth of the idea, not a summary of one paper followed by a summary of the next paper, etc. Try organizing the literature survey around ideas and not papers. Show the understanding of the idea changes as new papers address it. This is harder but much more interesting. You should read the Journal of Economic Literature for good examples of literature surveys. Pick out a topic of interest (trade and the environment—Copeland and Taylor; field experiments, Harrison and List; Gardner Brown on renewable resource use; environmental regulations and competitiveness—Jaffe et al., etc. all in the JEL) Look at the structure of these surveys to see how the ideas are developed. In your survey, explain how differences in results emerge from differences in approach, data or methods. This is the key to identifying a good research topic. If you can find conflicting results in the literature, then you have the potential to contribute to the literature by providing evidence in one direction or the other. This can be done as a separate section or perhaps you will want to integrate this into the summary of articles section. Suggestions for future research: What are the conflicts or inconsistencies in the literature? How might you redesign the studies to improve upon them or resolve the conflicts? It is essential to look for problems and anomalies in the literature. But you must find improved means of treating the problems. Trying to be specific, even when it doesn’t work out, will help you progress. Thinking of a better model, method, estimator or data source, etc., is the essence of a researchable idea.