MSCI609 Term Paper F2021
Here I provide some guidelines for the term paper. Please note there are 4 deliverables. I will post
marking schemes for each deliverable soon.
1. In Learn go to “Term Paper”, “Term Paper Data”, and download all 6 COVID data sets.
2. Unzip the data and read the questionnaire. Decide if you are interested in the topic and whether
you can create meaningful hypotheses using relevant questions.
3. Generate 3 to 5 hypotheses.
4. This is purely an example. Let us assume that you have daily air quality index data for 500
randomly selected cities. For each city you have daily data on number of admissions to hospital
related to breathing problems. You also have independent variables related to demography and
wealth. A possible hypothesis is: “H0: Air pollution does not cause breathing problems”. Another
hypothesis could be: “H0: Higher air pollution levels do not increase hospital admissions for
breathing problems”. Your regression equation will resemble this:
= 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + (1)

The unit of observation is the city. β1 is the intercept and the remaining β’s are coefficients. is
the error term (residual). A (dependent variable) is daily number of hospital admissions for lung
problems. P is the daily air quality index. GDP is the city’s gross domestic product per person. C
is the proportion of children and elderly relative to the city’s population. F is a binary variable (0,
1) indicating whether the city has coal fired factories or coal fired electrical power generating
stations. S (spring, summer, fall, winter) indicates the season in which the data was collected.

Deliverables:

D1 October 18. Upload to Learn: See D1 Marking Scheme for details (worth 2.5%)

D2 November 8-December 3. Upload to Learn: a narrated Power Point presentation of your term paper
and your preliminary findings. The presentation length should be between 10 to 15 minutes. But no more
than 15 minutes. Typically, presenters take 1 or 2 minutes per slide depending on the content. For a 10-
minute presentation you would never have more than 10 slides. Usually, you would have 5 to 7 slides.
On-campus students will do their presentation in class from November 15-December 3. (worth 7.5%)

D3 November 8-December 3. Upload to Learn: marking sheets for 2 assigned presentations (if you are an
online student). Presentation marking will be done in class for on-campus students. For online students
D3 represents 10% of your mark. For on-campus students D3 represents 5% of your weekly class
participation mark (15%).

D4 Dec 7. Upload final term paper to Learn. (worth 30% if online, worth 25% if on-campus)






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