Conducting good research is critical to any student today. Writing good research papers is equally important - yet many students have not been given the proper tools to convey cogently the results of their research. This book is for you or anyone who needs a step-by-step approach to the writing of a research paper in the field of economics.Most books concerned with research writing are broadly applied. They approach the subject generally, which is to say that they don't lay out a particular path to conducting research. Yet a specific path offering a specific focus to writing research is exactly what is needed for most students. This book provides that focus.For example, this book doesn't cover a dozen different search engines to perform a literature review; it specifies only EconLit. Nor are you left to decide what scholarly publications are important ones to review; the book emphasizes only the use of journal impact factors found through RePEc to rank journal articles and their importance to the literature at large. Whereas other books provide an overview of how to present research, with only cursory suggestions and tips, inside this book, the authors provide precise details on all aspects of research writing, including how many PowerPoint slides one should prepare for presentations and how much content should be on each slide. In short, unlike other books, this book provides a specific approach to conducting research, writing a paper, and presenting its material.

Many empirical researchers yearn for an econometric model that better explains their data. Yet these researchers rarely pursue this objective for fear of the statistical complexities involved in specifying that model. This book is intended to alleviate those anxieties by providing a practical methodology that anyone familiar with regression analysis can employ-a methodology that will yield a model that is both more informative and is a better representation of the data. This book outlines simple, practical procedures that can be used to specify a model that better explains the data. Such procedures employ the use of purely statistical techniques performed upon a publicly available data set, which allows readers to follow along at every stage of the procedure. Using the econometric software Stata (though most other statistical software packages can be used as well), this book demonstrates how to test for model misspecification and how to respecify these models in a practical way that not only enhances the inference drawn from the results, but adds a level of robustness that can increase the researcher's confidence in the output generated. By following this procedure, researchers will be led to a better, more finely tuned empirical model that yields better results.