ECON312 – RESEARCH PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS – FALL 2022

Professors Eric Chi – Due: November 25, 2022

Professional economists often work in environments where they are expected to communicate their
ideas not only with other economists, but also to the public, who doesn’t have any economics
background. In this assignment, you will take a stance on the following issue (detailed in the
scenario below). You should not assume that the audience has any knowledge of economics or has
taken any ECON courses. Because of this, you should always define any economic terms that
you introduce into your writing (if in doubt, ask a friend who hasn’t taken the course if they can
understand your definition).

1. Scenario:
(1-1) In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered the landscape of
urbanization. Using the topics discussed in ECON312, what are some changes that we
observe in terms of urbanization in the past 2 years? You must clearly state the thesis of
your paper (one main idea), and use 3 topics to support your thesis. For example, you
pick a thesis: COVID-19 accelerated the trend of working from home, which is
becoming the new norm. This could have implications on congestion, urban sprawl,
and housing demand (Note: I cite this example to give you an idea as to what is
expected). You MUST come up with your own thesis and supporting arguments relevant
to the course. You are expected to research and to use online news (local news media) and
magazine (Economist) articles, or academic papers to support your argument.
(1-2) Your task is to think about these phenomena, using the kinds of theories we have discussed
in ECON312. Notice that this is not a calculation problem, and we have not specified the
function you need in order to perform exact calculations. Instead, we want you to think
of this more generally using economic intuition. While there are lots of different angles
that you can take, we encourage you to take a more focused approach, choosing a couple
of major topics covered in the course (e.g: urban growth, housing choice, congestion, etc.).
You should be clear about your analysis and any implications that you are referring. If
you make any additional assumptions, you must clearly state them and if relevant, address
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what would happen if those assumptions do not hold.

2. Late Penalties:
(2-1) Assignments must be submitted to Crowdmark (for grading) and to Brightspace (for
plagiarism detection) by deadline on November 25 at 9pm. The submission links will be posted
on Brightspace course page. If you forget to upload to either one of the platforms, there will be 3
marks deducted.
(2-2) 3-marks penalty also applied daily after deadline until November 27 (Sunday), 2022
at 11:59pm.
(2-3) Late submissions beyond that will receive a zero. No exceptions apply.
3. Formatting:
To earn full marks, you must do the following:
(3-1) Your assignment must be typed, double-spaced in Times New Roman font size 12.
(3-2) Your article must have a title that summarizes the thesis of your paper in an appealing
way (it must attract the audience to read your work).
(3-3) Your assignment must be at most 1000 words in length. Exceeding by 100 words or so is fine,
but more than that will result in deduction on presentation marks.
(3-4) Put the word count of your assignment in parentheses at the end, “(X words)”.
(3-5) The file you submit must be in PDF format.

4. Writing Tips:
(4-1) Be relatively narrow in scope. The essay is relatively short. Making fewer arguments
will enable you to more completely develop your arguments.
(4-2) Use words to make arguments (Do not include graphs).
(4-3) Keep in mind that this is an ECON312 assessment, so make sure your essay
demonstrates a mastery of ECON312 concepts. The TA marking your assignment
should think, “Yes, this student has learned some ECON.”
(4-4) Use simple, clear language. Avoid metaphors, flowery speech (like “since the dawn of
time, economists have contemplated...” or jargon. Remember that your goal is to
clearly communicate your ideas to an audience without much economics background.
(4-6) Keep your sentences short.
(4-7) Make sure your paragraphs are self-contained and coherent: put only one main idea in
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each paragraph. Avoid too long (more than 1/3 of a page) or too short (one or two
sentences only) paragraphs.
(4-8) Make your main point early on, and make sure that everything you write serves to
support your main point.
(4-9) Support each argument with evidence, such as statistics, examples or economic reasoning.
(4-10) Make your economic concepts and reasoning clear on which your argument is based.
(4-11) You should give proper credit to an authored article. We prefer “Chi and Yildiz (2022)
present theoretical evidence that...” or “The authors present evidence that...” rather than
“Their paper presents...”.
(4-12) Be careful with the word “prove” (or disprove). Empirical analysis and studies produce
results. These results may support a particular theory, or they may be inconsistent with
that theory. These results, however, neither prove nor disprove anything.
(4-13) Check for grammatical errors using word-processing software.

5. A brief note on Plagiarism:
(5-1) When you write something, unless you indicate otherwise, you are claiming ownership of
both the underlying idea as well as its expressions (i.e. the words). It is plagiarism when
you implicitly claim either the idea or words of another by not attributing them to their
source.
(5-2) Do not, however, cite commonly known facts or ideas. For example, you do not have to
cite the fact that Canada is a large country. Likewise, you do not have to cite the idea
“higher interest rate reduces private investment spending”. If you must quote directly,
enclose in quotes any words written by anyone except you, and include in the text a proper
citation to the source. If you explain another author’s idea in your own words only, you
just need to provide a citation. However, if you use any sentences, sentence fragments or
phrases written by someone else, you absolutely must put them in quotes. Just as not
citing the source of an idea is an implicit ownership claim on the idea, you implicitly
claim ownership of all text not in quotes. If you claim ownership of text not in fact your
own original writing, this is a violation of the University’s Code of Behavior on Academic
Matters. Actually, you should rarely use the exact words of another. Assume that when
you quote directly, the reader is going to infer that you are too lazy to do your
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own writing. You should therefore limit direct quotes to those cases where it is clear that
your use of quotes is not due to laziness. There are three valid exceptions to no-quote
rule.
(i) Eloquence1
(ii) Outrageousness.
(iii) Subtlety.
(5-3) In short, unless use of the exact words is necessary, do not quote.