During the semester students were required to do the following:
Problem Sets
Four problem sets (not available to OCW users.) These are designed to build a mixture of theoretical and empirical skills.
Referee Report
One referee report on either:
Faber, Benjamin. “Trade Integration, Market Size, and Industrialization: Evidence from China’s National Trunk Highway System.” July 17, 2013.
OR
Allen, Treb. “Information Frictions in Trade.” October 25, 2011.
These are two recent and successful job market papers on topics in international trade. Your report should be 5+ pages long and include:
- a summary of the main features of the paper (one paragraph);
- a description of its contribution to the literature (one paragraph);
- its main strengths and weaknesses;
- your recommendations to improve it (2-3 pages).
Research Proposal
The proposal should be 15-20 pages long (double-spaced) and describe:
- the question you want to address;
- why you think it is important;
- why you think the answer of the previous literature is unsatisfactory;
- how you plan to improve it.
Your grade will reflect both the precision with which you answer these questions (in particular, the concreteness of your proposed improvement, ie how far you have thought it through and progressed to date) and the quality of the proposed improvement (ie how good an idea for a paper it seems).
