MSCI 609 – Fall 2021
1

Deliverable 4 – Term Paper Marking Scheme

Note: Write the paper in complete sentences. Look at the journal articles that you cite in the
paper. Your paper should look similar in style and content to a journal article. Make your
writing concise.

For more writing guidance see:
https://medium.com/@INOMICS/top-writing-tips-for-economics-papers-e035d1d11b22

1. Introduction (10 marks)
- motivate your topic by recent findings in academia, in the media, in government
publications (you can include a table or a figure to highlight the issue)
- try to ensure that the reader wants to keep reading your paper
- what is the problem?
- why is it important?
- where is the gap in the literature?
- how to address this gap in the literature?
- state your objective very clearly
- what is your contribution?
2. Literature Review (20 marks)
- find 5 papers that you can cite in the literature review
- it is a good idea to categorize previous results in a table
- explain the objective of the authors, their data, their methods, and results
- put all the results into context for the reader – by grouping them together if possible
3. Methods (20 marks)
- first subsection -- will be the narrative of what you do (explain the procedure in
words to the reader first)
- second subsection -- is the model description/explanation in math
- state your hypotheses -- explain why each one is interesting
- does it challenge existing literature?
- is it different than what others have said?
- explain what is going on to the reader (the intuition behind it)

4. Data (10 marks)
- briefly discuss the DVs and IVs and explain how they relate to the model in the
methods section
- tell the reader that the appendix contains a description of each variable, its type,
how it was constructed and source
- provide a table of mean, standard deviation, min, max for each variable

MSCI 609 – Fall 2021
2

Table. Descriptive statistics
Variable mean Std Deviation Min Max
X1 1.112 1.233 2.342 23.551
X2 0.12 0.001 0.000 1.000
X3 0.762 0.982 0.000 2.500
… … … … …
Xn

5. Results (20 marks)
- you need to put results into tables
- you can discuss normality tests of the DV
- you can discuss tests of means between your DVs or IVs
- two or three subsections only
- group the analyses together (same kinds of analysis)

6. Implications and conclusion (10 marks)
- remind the reader of your propositions
- insert punchy titles for what you want to say for each proposition
- what have we learned that we did not know before?
- what is the key message that is new to SCHOLARS?
- what are the limitations?
7. References (7 marks)
- You might consider using a free reference manager such as Mendeley
- Mendeley has a plug-in for Microsoft Word
Appendix (3 marks)
Variable Description Variable type How constructed Source
X1 Describe what the
variable is
Continuous X1=ln(x12+x13)/2 OECD
X2 Describe what the
variable is
Scale from 1 to 5 - OECD
X3 Describe what the
variable is
Positive integers - IMF
… … … … …
Xn