Econ 323 Fall 2008 Writing Assignment 2: Literature Review Instructions, Assignments of Finance

Download Econ 323 Fall 2008 Writing Assignment 2: Literature Review Instructions and more Assignments Finance in PDF only on Docsity! Econ 323 (Fall 2008) Writing Assignment 2 Due October 15, in class: Annotated bibliography Due October 22, in class: 1 st draft Due October 31, 5 pm: Final paper Write a literature review on a topic related to the course material. You may use the topic in the article that you summarized for the first writing assignment or you may examine the abstracts your classmates posted on Moodle to find other acceptable ideas. If you have any question about whether your topic is acceptable, please contact me. What is a literature review? A literature review is an organized and synthesized summary of a number of academic articles (5 to 10) related to a chosen topic. A literature review should not summarize each article separately but find common themes throughout the articles, identify areas of controversy, and possibly, formulate questions that need further research. You are building an account of what has been published by researchers. For example, suppose your topic is the pros and cons of inflation targeting. You might find several articles on the success/failure of inflation targeting, some on the prospects of inflation targeting in the U.S. and a few theoretical papers on the optimality of inflation targeting as a monetary policy regime. The literature review might be divided into these sections with the use of sub-headings. What is an academic article? An academic article is written by a trained research economist not a newspaper or magazine reporter. Although many academic articles are too technical for undergraduates, most articles written for Federal Reserve publications are accessible. In addition to the Federal Reserve, there are several other sources (Journal of Economic Perspectives, The American Economist, The Economists’ Voice, and World Economics) of less technical articles. I encourage you to explore other journals such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking that on occasion have less technical articles. How to get started. Pick a topic. Go to the library. Look up a dozen papers on your topic. Read them. Write summaries as you read. Contemplate common themes, areas of controversy among the papers. Write the literature review. Often once you find one or two papers on a topic you can use the reference list at the end as a guide to related papers. However, you should still conduct a search to make sure you haven’t missed a large portion of the literature. You should not just read and write on the first ten papers you find. Reference format and use of footnotes. Reference articles by author’s name and date of publication. Use footnotes to elaborate a point not to cite articles. For example, Julie Smith (2004) finds that the weighted median inflation rate is a good forecaster of headline inflation. Alternatively, the weighted median is found to be a good forecaster of headline inflation (Smith, 2004). Cite the Smith publication in the reference list at the end of the paper. You may use any recognized citation format in the reference list. What is an annotated bibliography? An annotated bibliography is a list of resources on a certain topic with a description of each resource. Each entry in an annotated bibliography should include all the information you would normally include in a list of works cited. The bibliographic information is followed by an annotation, which can be just a few sentences and often both describes and evaluates the contents of the item. For your annotated bibliography, you should group your references by which sub-heading it would appear under. An academic article may appear under more than one sub-heading and the annotation would be slightly different when it appears under two distinct sub-headings.