Economics 312

Spring 2011

Final Project Topic Assignments

Project Requirements

Your project should consist of a report (due at noon on Monday, May 16) and a presentation in class at the final-exam time on the evening of Tuesday, May 17. Your reports will be posted on the class Web site so that other groups may read them prior to your presentation.

Project Topic Assignments

Jeremy Laughton
Su Liu
Predicting a Reed student's eventual success at the end of the first year

We have talked some in class about predicting grades in general or in specific courses based on SAT scores and other credentials in the admission file. At the end of the first year, we have one year's worth of grades in various courses. This project will investigate how successfully you can predict (a) whether a student will complete a Reed degree and (b) what the student's final GPA will be, based on admission credentials, the student's grade in Hum 110, and the student's first-year GPA.

Data set will be sent by email.

Carl Hedman
Alden Jones
Analysis of earnings of French and English speakers in Canada

This project uses the 2001 Canadian Census to examine one or more hypotheses about how language spoken affects earnings, returns to education, or the male-female earnings differential, both in traditionally French-speaking Quebec and in other provinces. The dataset is in a "text" format that can be easily input to Stata.

Data is on CD, available in class.

Lillian Karabaic
Michael Kincaid
Supply and demand for air transportation

This project uses an extended version of the airfares dataset from the midterm (including four years of data rather than one) to estimate supply and demand curves for air travel. Those who do this project will be expected to add one or more variables to the dataset, such as city population, location, vacation destination status, hub status, etc.

Dataset will be sent by email.

Lauren Bloomquist
Ben Sutphin
Which characteristics are most important in determining Portland house prices

This project uses a Stata dataset compiled by Noel Netusil to examine how various home and neighborhood characteristics affect home prices in Portland. There are many structural and environmental characteristics in the dataset whose effects could be examined.

Data are on a CD, available in class.

Gabriel Forsythe-Korzeniewicz
Mark Hintz
Purchasing-power parity in the long run

The idea of purchasing-power parity (that exchange rates should adjust to changes in two countries' price levels) is an appealing one that "should" hold in the long run. This project uses easily available data on price indexes and exchange rates to test whether price differentials and exchange rates have a stable, long-run cointegrating relationship and the dynamics of convergence to the long-run equilibrium.