The objective of the assignment is to practise the use of SAS for analysing financial data.

1. PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

There are two different options for the topic of the project . Each student can choose one of these topics, according with their preference.

Topic A: Associations between covid-19 and the economy.

This project is about analysing data publicly available in internet, to find associations between covid-19 health crisis/recovery and economic indicators.

The student will find in internet the datasets they will use for the study. A variety of   health indicators related to covid-19 can be used (measured as number of positive   cases, deaths, hospitalization, vaccination statistics, … ) , as well as a variety of       economic indicators (stock-index prices or volatility, gdp, unemployment rates, …). It is important that the health information and the economic indicators are obtained      from different sources/databases.

Although this topic can be approached using time-series analysis tools, a cross-      sectional approach is recommended. The student can also decide the granularity of the study (country-level data, local or regional). Typical example of cross sectional  analysis includes comparison of different countries in the world, or comparing          different regions/cities within a country.

Topic B: Community factors associated with contributions to the electoral campaigns.

This project is about finding associations between community characteristics that might predict or explain the contributions of individuals in such community.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an independent group that monitors     campaign finance information. The websitewww.fec.govcontains information on   individual donors. Donations, refunds and transfers data of individual contributions are publicly available at the website. There is Information about several years, you can choose what data to download depending or your research questions.

For this project, the student would need to review the datasets available (FEC data) with data on individual donors. Develop research questions that you find plausible    and interesting. The student will look in internet for additional information to research those questions. For example, the United States Census Data webpage (at www.census.gov) can be used, but other sources of information are welcome. I        assume the data from FEC will be conveniently aggregated at state, local or regional level in order to address the research questions.

2. Objective and tasks.

Formulate a research or business questions that can be answered with more than one publicly available datasets. Use SAS code to pre-process the datasets           (modifications, variable creations, selection of cases, aggregation of cases,          merging,…) and to perform appropriate procedures that provide insight into this    questions.

The question or the employed methodology does not need to be complicated.

The report can have a maximum of four pieces (tables or graphics) where at least one is a table and one is a graphic.

Deliverables:

-    REPORT. A pdf file containing the report. The report will have the following parts (maximum 500 words):

o Description of the research/business question and the datasets. (around 50-100 words).

o Tables and graphics (total of three, do not count towards word count).

o Description and discussion of the results (around 200 words).

o Answer to the question. (around 200 words).

-   CODE.

-   Compressed file with the RAW DATASETS.

Marking criteria:

There are four elements, equally weighted.

A.  Business Question and Answer. Did the analysis provide insight into answering the question? Is this insight clearly explained in the answer?

B.  Using the data. Is the data appropriate for the question? Was the data from the different sources appropriately pre-processed, modified and merged?

C. Visualization. Are the tables and graphics appropriately tuned to emphasize the insight provided? Are tables and graphics useful to make the argument   clearer? Are they self-explained?