Research Seminar 2400-SU1RS

This seminar builds the foundation for students’ independent research and thus prepares them to write their own MA thesis in the second year of the program.
The goals for each participant of the seminar are as follows:
- Exposure to state-of-the-art research in economics;
- Developing familiarity with key analytic tools;
- Acquisition of modeling skills;
- Acquisition of basic academic writing skills;
- Exposure to useful presentation techniques.
Modeling skills are essential to conduct successful theoretical as well as empirical research. Academic writing skills are crucial for communicating your research ideas to other people. The style of academic papers is unique, complex, and subtle. Hence, main emphasis will be placed on three elements: developing practical research and writing skills, learning how to do research on your own and getting ideas for own research.
Course Description:
The seminar will last for both terms of the first year of study. Every two weeks there will be a seminar with a presentation given by a guest speaker / speakers (e.g. from IMF, World Bank, National Bank of Poland, research institutes, other universities) and a discussion, including on-the-forum contributions to speakers' presentations prepared by participants. Every other week there will be a group meeting with a coordinator, where students give presentations including all the important points they want to raise in their essays.
Each essay should include:
- Title page with an abstract
- Introduction with motivation, intuition, goals and structure
- Literature survey
- Analysis of the problem presented in the paper – the weight of the problem, its practical meaning, etc.
- Critical analysis of the presented paper
- In the winter semester: a list of possible future extensions
- In the spring semester: new research on the problem
- Concluding section with your main points summarized
- Bibliography
In the winter semester students should suggest at least two possible extensions. For each of them they should describe:
- what the suggested extension is,
- the intuition behind it,
- what result they hope to obtain,
- why it is significant,
- its’ feasibility.
In the summer semester students actually have to implement one extension per essay. This may have a form of theoretical or econometric extensions of the reviewed papers, including:
- a step further in the research described in the reviewed paper,
- solutions of some special cases,
- alternative methods of estimation,
- tests which were not conducted in the original research,
- alternative assumptions, approaches,
- etc.
Alternatively it can be a new research connected with the analyzed paper.