This page is for the two course Research Methods sequence for the MS Economics program.
New material will be added throughout the semester.
ECON 6901 Syllabus
Approved Journal List (there are many, many other journals that are perfectly acceptable – this list just provides over 100 from primarily Economics and Finance to give you a starting point of reputable journals)
Guidelines on writing your research paper
Notes on summary statistics and tables
Articles/presentations for past research methods courses:
Slides on Nardinelli and Simon (1990)
Notes on Malueg and Yates (2010)
Creating Presentations for Research Methods
Some published journal articles by prior Research Methods students:
Resources you may find helpful:
Hal Varian’s article on “How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time.” This paper is mostly useful for how to think about coming up with research ideas and it has some good advice on presentations.
Jesse Shapiro’s slides on “How to Give an Applied Micro Talk.” While the slides are more geared towards a PhD student on the job market, there is still some very relevant advice for you all.
There are any number of ways to begin a literature search.
Google Scholar
Many times you will get multiple versions of the same paper using Google Scholar — this is because most academic papers go through a substantial revision process before actually being published.
JSTOR
You need to be on the university server to use JSTOR unless you have your own subscription. You can access JSTOR and other electronic resources if you go to the Atkins Library page and log in. It may also work if you use the VPN.
Web of Science
What I have found Web of Science most useful for is their Cited Reference Searches. Suppose you have a paper from 1995 – you can easily see which papers that paper has cited by looking at the references. But suppose you want to know which papers have cited the paper you are reading? The cited reference search feature allows you to do that for the publications in its database. Now their database does not include every journal, but it is a place to get started. You can also do this with Google Scholar, but there you can get multiple hits from the same paper. Web of Science typically focuses on the high impact journals in the field.
NBER Programs and NBER Working Groups
These are groups within the NBER that contain a focused collection of research papers. The programs tend to be more mainstream or established – in terms of length of time the field has existed – fields in economics research while the groups tend to focus on newer areas of research within economics.
Potential sources of data:
There are many, many sources of data. We are just listing some major sources of data.
City of Charlotte Data Portal
This link is for the City of Charlotte Data Portal. I’m not quite sure what data is on the site or how useful it is but it is here for you to peruse.
FRED
This link is to the Federal Reserve Economic Data, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. There is a wealth of data here.
IRS
This link is to the main IRS site. There are a bunch of different data series here, from migration data to tax return data (typically for individuals at some aggregate level, like the state level). Type “data” into the search field to see what comes up.
Census
This link is to data from the Census Bureau. Having some idea of the information you want would be helpful before searching the site.
CDC
This link is to data from the Center for Disease Control. There is a good bit of health related data here. It seems like the “Tools and Resources” section has some actual data, whereas the “Data & Statistics by Topic” is more designed to show a very basic snapshot of some data.
Belk College of Business Databases
This link shows the databases that the Belk College of Business subscribes to. You can look through them to see what type of data is available.