Tips for Paper Proposals

The aim of the paper proposal is to give you a chance to announce what you plan to do in your second-year paper and why it’s worth doing.

Your presentation should provide the following information:

1. A puzzle (empirical or theoretical) to address

2. A discussion of a few relevant papers that are recent examples of how to think about this puzzle or that provide a technique that you think can be readily and fruitfully applied to your puzzle.

3. What’s missing in the current literature and what your contribution will be.

Unlike the literature review, this talk should be focused fairly narrowly. Research tends to take you into different directions than you initially plan, but the hope is to get you pointed in a sensible direction, at least initially.

If your proposal has obvious flaws, the seminar coordinators will try to identify them and warn you before you invest too much time. If there are directions for improvement, or related literatures/approaches then we’ll try to point them out too.

Your proposal is also an opportunity for your second-year paper supervisor to think hard about what you plan to do and to get to know you and your skills a bit better. Ideally, think of the proposal as a first draft of the introduction to your paper with a slightly elongated description of the related literature. But you should try to be as specific as possible. If you are planning an empirical paper, then a description of the data set that you will use, where you can obtain it, and even an initial run or table of descriptive statistics would help.