Monetary Economics

Your paper can be written in either English or French. Please make sure to follow the the Academic Integrity Student’s Guide
Paper Evaluation 1. Background: 20 points a) Research question Your research question(s) should be clearly stated. What is the main goal of your paper? Please be specific (see the instructions that were given for the “Project Outline” Assignment). In addition, you should provide a motivation of why this question is important/relevant/interesting. b) Literature review Describe how previous papers have addressed your same (or closely related) research question(s). Use your judgement in selecting the papers that are more closely related to your analysis. Organize your literature review (group together the papers that use your same methodology, or that study your same country,…). For more detailed information, see the instructions that were given for the “Project Outline” Assignment. c) Contributions Discuss your research question/methodology/results in comparison with the previous literature. What (specifically) are you doing in this paper that has not been done before? What do we learn from your paper that we didn’t know from the previous literature?

1. Methodology: 30 points. a) Description of the model You should provide a clear description of your model and its main features. If you are using a model that was proposed by a previous paper, be explicit about the changes that you are making (if any). b) Implementation of the model You should describe the approach that you use to implement your model. In most cases, you will want to estimate your model parameters (and then perhaps use these estimates to compute impulse-responses, variance decomposition,…). In other cases, your empirical strategy might be based on a different approach, as for instance a simulation exercise, or the use of formulas to compute a series of structural shocks. In any case, make sure to describe the procedure that you are employing. It is not necessary to mention the statistical software that you use for the empirical analysis. On the other hand, you need to specify the econometric method that you employ to estimate the parameters of the model (OLS, SUR, maximum likelihood, Bayesian estimation,…). If you are reporting impulse responses or confidence intervals, specify the technique that you use to compute the standard errors/error bands, if this is different from the method used to estimate the parameters of the model (for instance bootstrapping). You should also provide detailed information about the data that you employ. Be explicit about data transformations, definition of the variables, source(s) of your data,… If your analysis is based on a simulation exercise, provide the value of the parameters (or other measures) that you use in the exercises, and specify all the details of the simulation procedure.
2. Results: 30 points
   a) Description of the main results: Present the main results of your paper in the way that you think most appropriate to convey your message (you can use figures, tables,…). Provide an economic interpretation of your results. Compare your results to the previous literature: do your results confirm those of other studies in this area? (If your paper is an extension of a previous work, are your results consistent with those of this work?) If not, to what extent are they different? What are possible explanations for the differences? Note: make sure that the discussion of your results is consistent with your stated research question and contributions of the paper.
   b) Robustness analysis Provide a discussion of the robustness of your results to changes in the baseline framework (for instance, changes in the sample period, changes in the definition of one or more of the variables, changes in the assumptions used to identify the model,…).
3. Form: 20 points
   a) Presentation Make sure that: the pages in your paper are numbered, your tables and figures are clear, the graphs are labelled, your notation is consistent, the equations, tables, and pictures are numbered correctly, the papers that you mention are reported in the reference list, the names of your references are correctly spelled,…
   b) Clarity of the discussion Make sure that the language is clear. I am not a native speaker of either English or French, so I will take into account that if I don’t understand something it might be my fault rather than yours. However, it is important that you are able to convey your main points to an average reader (i.e. someone like me). So, you will be penalized if a significant portion of your discussion is confusing and unclear, or if you are not using Economic/Econometric terms properly, or if there are a lot of typos and grammatical mistakes.