Davidson College Mark
C. Foley
Department of Economics Fall
2002
Building on the first Data Assignment, this assignment also asks you to collect economic data and statistics, but this time your final product will be a three-page paper, written in an editorial style like that used by columnists for newspapers. (If you want to see examples of writing to the audience I am thinking of, read Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times, Paul Samuelson’s in Newsweek magazine, or George Will’s in the Sacramento Bee.) Your audience is a general audience that only reads columns if they are entertaining and credible.
Your assignment is to find basic facts surrounding
one issue of your choice from the following:
tax cuts, social security privatization, energy policy, interest rate
cuts, national security, or reform of corporate governance.
While the style of this three-page editorial will be
creative, the content will not be! Make
sure your arguments are consistent (where relevant) with at least one theory of
macroeconomics. (That is, do not make
an argument that in one paragraph assumes a classical model and then in the
next assumes a Keynesian framework. If
this happens, it means your arguments are in conflict with one another.) The arguments you make must be backed up by data
collected as described below. In each
section, I direct you to go to three data sources in search of some data
related to your chosen topic. (I want data
— numbers! — not the source’s normative judgment or opinions or thoughts or
even historical facts. This assignment
is aimed at promoting data awareness.)
You are required to use the data, but how you use it is up to your
discretion.
Note that the best arguments often anticipate counter-arguments (if they do not explicitly acknowledge them). So make sure you consider the opposing view when crafting your paper.
If you have questions, please come by to talk during
my office hours or make an appointment, and don’t hesitate to take advantage of
the Writing Center. In addition to the
library web page, you may find Bill Goffe’s “Resources for Economists” web page
useful; it is at http://www.rfe.org/.
REQUIRED
SOURCE: First you need to identify a proposal that is being publicly
debated. Use LexisNexis (or other
sources) to find articles from at least three different press sources
mentioning the proposal that you will be writing about. You can find LexisNexis on the library web
page under Indexes and Databases (then General and News). You may want to see a reference librarian if
you have never used this database.
CHOOSE
2 OF 3: Find data that you think will
be useful to your topic from a) the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page b) the
tables at the end of the Economic Report of the President (available in paper
and online), and/or c) the Statistical Abstract of the United States (available
in paper and online). These are
available through my links page http://www.davidson.edu/academic/economics/foley/links.html.
Week
of Nov 18 (detailed government data)
CHOOSE 2 OF 3: Find data that you think will be
useful to your topic from a) a government document or web page from the
Congressional Budget Office or the Office of Management and Budget, b) one of
the Federal Reserve Bank web pages, and/or c) National Income and Product
Account (NIPA) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Week
of Nov 25 (international data)
CHOOSE 2 OF 3: Find data that you think will be
useful to your topic from a) International Financial Statistics yearbooks, b)
the Penn World Tables web site, and/or c) the World Bank or IMF web pages
(“country data”).
Week of Dec 2
CHOOSE 1 OF 2: Find data that you think will be
useful to your topic from a) the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Macro-Historical Database or b) the Survey of Consumers from the University of
Michigan.
No doubt you have found some other data sources
while exploring the resources above. Or
you might feel there are a few key numbers you need to make your case that are
not in the sources I have directed you to.
This is the time when you can fill in those gaps. These sources should provide data —
not just opinion, theory, or thought.
You may make some calculations of your own (using Excel for
example) if you feel it is appropriate.
If you do so, be sure to cite the sources of the original data you used
and indicate what new statistics you created and why.