ASSESSMENT DESCRIPTION: You are required to draft an essay for an academic audience using the  thesis statement that you have workshopped and developed in the first few weeks of the semester. All the assessments in the course are building towards this output so completing all the assessments and responding to feedback is critical to producing a polished finished product.

The essays must follow one of two formats based on your workshopped thesis statement:

1.    Persuasive essay. This type of essay is for thesis statements that are explicitly arguing a point that you want to convince your reader is true or false. You should aim to build an argument   around some data and use research from the academic literature to support your claims.

2.    Research proposal. You can write a proposal for a specific research project. You can think about this in several ways – as the narrative section of a research grant, as a proposal that   one would write to receive permission to conduct research in a public sector or professional context, or as the proposal for a masters or PhD thesis.

No matter which type of essay you choose to write, you must include

1.    A graph that motivates or supports the thesis of your essay. This will likely be a version of the graph that we workshop in class in the Graph Assessment.

2.    Each essay should include motivation and evidence from credible academic sources.

What are “credible” academic sources in economics? While there is some debate on this, a good   starting point would be to draw most citations from journals ranked in the top 500 in the world on this listing of journals for IDEAS/RePEc:

https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.simple.html

and at least a couple recent citations from the top 200 journals. It is not enough just to cite papers from these journals (e.g., as secondary citations), as it is critical that you identify multiple papers from this set of journals that are directly relevant to your main argument (i.e., you should be speaking to an issue that has been debated in such journals). Given academic publishing lags, it may  be hard to find published research on important and current economic issues. For example, there’s   now a lot of literature on the early impacts of COVID-19, but less on the recovery from COVID-19. If   debate on the issue has not yet emerged in the academic literature, such that you can find papers on either side of the debate, then it is not an acceptable topic.

In general, the essays will have the following format: short introduction (1 or 2 short paragraphs max) that includes your thesis statement, evidence/exposition with graph, short conclusion. The introduction will motivate the central argument (the “hook”), outline the main aspects of the essay, argue for the importance of the topic of the essay, and include the thesis statement. The evidence/exposition is the meat of the essay – it will bring the student’s research to bear, in outlining the evidence for the main argument or point of the essay and typically include the graph (some essay may use the graph as motivation so it more naturally sits in the introduction), while the conclusion will succinctly tie up the essay.