December 22nd, 2020 
Length
Fall 2020
Econ 3020
First Draft Guidelines
The first and final draft should be at least 4 pages, excluding the bibliography, graphs, tables, and other various visual aids. Your essay must be double spaced using Times New Roman 12-inch font.
2. Topic
You can write your paper about any topic of interest you but is related to content from Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11 in the textbook. This may be an overwhelming endeavor as there are many interesting and open topics to choose from. But the fun from this project is that you have unfettered latitude to pursue an economic topic as long as it fits with the content of this course and it is a topic you are able to discuss and connect to Intermediate Macroeconomic theory.
An example of a relevant topic is the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic growth in the long term. There are different avenues for you to explore this topic, such as the effect of the pandemic on consumption, investment, international trade. Also, you can use the chapter on economic growth in the textbook (Chapter 8) to guide your investigation of the impact of the pandemic.
I will not be using a rubric to grade your essay, but I will be grading based on the quality of work that you have submitted. Specifically, how well you connect the economic theory to the discussion of your topic. Also, your paper should have a strong empirical component. This means the paper should analyze data in some way, such as using graphs or tables.
3. Empirical component
A strong essay should include the use of empirical analysis. This can be undertaken in the form of graphs, tables, summary statistics, and so forth. A popular and convenient source for publicly available economic data is provided by the Federal Reserve Bank at the following website: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/. You can download data and create graphs on this website. If you have questions about navigating this website, please contact me.
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