Fluent Essays

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” ... Summer 2019 Research Paper: Handout 1 Outline: 1) Choosing a Topic 2) Gathering Data The research paper that you will write this term will be a challenge. It will force you to come up with an original issue to analyze, a daunting task for professional economists! It will force you to truly understand an area of financial markets in minute detail. You will have to scrounge the library and Internet for any information, whether main or tangential, that pertains to your topic. Chances are, however, that you will enjoy it. Besides of choosing an issue that interests you, rather than having me choose one at random, you will put more effort (of your own choosing) into the project. You will also gain valuable research and writing experience, skills that will aid in college classes and in other areas of life. Finally, financial knowledge never hurts anyone – only financial ignorance does. Let me start with a few ground rules. Two weeks past the last day of the program, no later than Friday, July 2nd at 5:00pm, you will send me this project via email. It will be approximately fifteen typed pages (about 4,000 words. Don’t single-space the paper, with ¼ inch margins just so it fits on fifteen pages!); this number can include graphs and tables, though it is permissible to go over twenty pages if you have included copious graph/tables. If you do not turn in the final draft of your paper by the deadline stated above, you will receive a zero, and will most definitely fail the program. 1) Choosing a topic a) Choosing a topic can be daunting, just because the choices in subject matter are overwhelming. Banking and financial markets encompass so many aspects of our life and culture, from the mundane and highly local to international in scope. Keep in mind that I would like you to choose a topic that interests you, not a topic that you may think interests me. Some of the best projects that I have read have been on subjects about which I previously knew nothing. Here is a small sample of topics (actual student Wall Street semester papers): ● The end of the NYSE? Electronic Trading and the Future of Financial Markets ● Dishonesty and Discrimination in Financial Markets ● Playing Close to the Hedge: An Overview of Hedge Funds, Hedge Fund Failures, and Hedge Fund Regulation ● Risk Aversion in Financial Markets ● Capital Controls: The Development of the World’s Dominant Financial Centers ● Predatory Lending and the Happy Homeowner ● Deconstructing the Asian Financial Crisis and Mexican Peso Crisis ● LBOs and Private Equity Groups ● Over-regulation or Under-regulation in United States Financial Markets? ● The Best of Both Worlds: NYSE’s Commitment to Ongoing Success ● The Origins and Consequences of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act ● Private Equity: Angel or Barbarian? ● Bitcoin, Apple Pay, and Amazon Stores: Oh My! The Evolution and Future of Money ● A Study of Insider Trading and Its Market Effects ● Detroit and Puerto Rico: What Caused the Debt Defaults? ● Market Globalization: Links between the stock markets of the U.S., Britain, and Japan ● How do Hedge Funds Affect Financial Markets? Insight and Analysis ● International Lending and Its Effect on Sub-Saharan Africa ● The effect of financial markets on global economic development (focus on India’s Grameen Bank) ● Flash Boys or Con Men? The efficiency and inequity of high-speed trading ● The effect of financial markets on local economic development (ie: Red Bulls stadium, new Yankees stadium, etc.) ● A Parasitic or Symbiotic Relationship? The Federal Reserve System and Wall Street ● How the Great Depression still affects America Today ● Are Big Corporate Wall Street Mergers good for America? ● Does International Agency Lending Help or Hurt Developing Countries? The World Bank under a Magnifying Glass I will say this once: BE ORIGINAL!! (Do NOT limit yourself to one of these topics!) b) Bibliography Once you have chosen a topic, you need to conduct a literature search. You need to find out what other people have written on the subject. There will ALWAYS be some papers that relate to your topic, no matter how indirectly. Trust me on this one. Come talk to me if you can find no hint of useful materials. The first step to this process is to go into an electronic database called EconLit. From an Internet browser such as Mozilla, go to the Drew Library home page (available from Drew’s main page – just choose Drew Community at the top of the page). Go to Research >> Online Resources >> Economics (under ‘Social Sciences’) >> EconLit. Then, follow the instructions in the database to conduct a search (keywords, etc.) One useful property of EconLit is that you can email the results of your search to your account. Even better, most of the journal articles that you find will be downloadable in .pdf format. It may turn out, depending on your topic, that you will not have to visit the library at all! (unless you are focusing on an issue that is more historical in nature) Other online resources include online journal and news articles. To get to these links from the Drew Library home page, go to Research >> Online Resources >> Economics (under ‘Social Sciences’ >> Proquest – though it contains fewer ‘real’ economics articles, there are many online business articles here, dating back to the mid-1980s. These would be good to motivate your topic, especially in the introduction. Business Source Premier – roughly similar to Proquest, but a) it includes business journal articles, and b) it goes back to the 1960s Lexis-Nexis Academic – contains full-text versions of articles from almost every U.S. newspaper. One very important note: make sure that a portion of your bibliography (at least three, and preferably five or more citations) consists of articles from books and professional journals, such as the Journal of Monetary Economics or American Economic Review. I won’t accept a bibliography consisting solely of articles from Time, Newsweek and Yahoo. This is economics and business! You need some semblance of models, not gossip from a chat room! You must turn in your topic proposal (which should begin with a sentence stating the facet of banking and/or financial markets you have chosen to analyze, and a one-paragraph, more detailed explanation below) by the evening of Wednesday, June 12. c) Outline: Suffice to say, everyone’s paper will be quite different. Therefore, a generic outline will hardly help many of you. But I offer one anyway, so that you may get a handle on how to study your issue. 1. Introduction (state issue and why it is of importance) 2. Background (here you will want to go into the history of the subject. For example, if you are looking at how the equity market structures of the U.S. and Canada differ, you would want to talk about the creation of these institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as how the two sets of systems have withstood financial turmoil) 3. The Issue at Hand – an explanation of the current issue 4. Policy Recommendations (or how you see the issue changing in the future, ie: the future of the U.S. equities markets) 5. Conclusion (just a wrap-up of what you have talked about in the past ten pages) 2) Data You WILL be required to analyze and discuss financial data in your project! More about this, including data sources, will be forthcoming. Deadline (once again): Wednesday, June 12 Paper Proposal Due (title and brief description) Tuesday, July 2 Final Version of Paper Due, by 5:00pm! No exceptions!! Proposal: How will Russia’s market turmoil in 2008, and subsequent reform, affect global and regional financial markets? Is democracy in Russia doomed, by the very forces it has tried to emulate? I intend to analyze how the sweeping democratization in the former heart of the Soviet Union has changed the country, as well as how it has coped with the developmental and financial problems that have emerged in the past few years. Government inefficiency and financial speculation have at times brought Russia to the brink of economic ruin. Can Russia survive more of these crises? Can stable investment opportunities be sustained? Outline: Introduction More in-depth statement of proposal. Include very recent events (say, over the past few days or weeks). Also, include motivation – why is this topic of interest to people? Democracy History of the past twenty years. Include discussion of the former Soviet Union and its collapse. Also include various financial crises that occurred soon after. Structure of financial markets in Russia. Market Events and Discussion of Issue Discuss 1998’s turmoil (near default on government bonds, subsequent collapse of ruble and their effects on global financial markets). Also mention the situation in 2008, which involves utter collapse of Russian stock markets (70\% drop in index in one week alone!) Suggestions for financial market stability Responsible government regulation is key to financial survival! Also, a stable market is necessary to get rid of as much risk as possible – need confident investors! Conclusion Bibliography: 1. Buch, Claudia M.; Heinrich, Ralph P.; and Christian Pierdzioch, 1999, The Value of Waiting: Russias Integration into the International Capital Markets. Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol 27, no. 2, pp. 209 – 230. 2. Kirkow, Peter, 1999, Foreign Trade Arrangements in Russia and Its Regions: Relying on Foreign Capital to Generate Growth? Post-Communist Economies, Vol 11, No. 1, pp. 79-98. 3. Kochetkova, O., 1998, The Economic Consequences of the Government Crisis in Russia. (The Situation in the Financial Market), Problems of Economic Transition, v41 n6, pp. 80-88. 4. Slay, Ben, 1999, An Interpretation of the Russian Financial Crisis, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, v40 n3, pp. 206-14. 5. Hedlund, Stefan, 1999, Russias market economy : a bad case of predatory capitalism, London : UCL Publishers.