Econ 6007 Labour Economics
Assessment: A critical replication study
1 Introduction
The overall objective of this exercise is to replicate and critically discuss some work in the established applied labour literature (see Table of Resources).
2 Research tasks
The objective is to replicate your chosen paper, to examination and discuss crit-ically the research design as well as the contributions of the paper.
Your essay should be about 2,000 words, excluding tables, figures, code, data output, bibliographies and appendices.
Q1 What are the contributions of this study?
. Write a brief summary (no more than 1.5 pages) that discusses the contributions of this study. You might wish to consider the following questions: What are the objectives, and how do they relate to the established literature? What is novel about the empirical strategy? What are the results and how convincing are these?
Q2 Seek to replicate the results reported in your chosen article. (Some stud- ies are more difficult than others to replicate and this will betaken into account in the assessment.)
. Note: a paper might have a lot of tables and figures. What is expected is that you replicate the essential output for example, sum- mary statistics, basic graphs, main regressions and some further analyses results; make it easy for the reader to follow your exposi-tion (the notebooks used in the lectures give you several examples).
. A notebook is a good way to include your code in a transparent manner (ie both code and results are important). Q3 Where relevant, critical assess the maintained assumptions and the iden- tification strategy. For instance, where relevant, you might wish todis- cuss the strength of the set of instruments in work using IV estimation; or, where relevant, you might wish to explore the robustness of the reported results by changing the environment marginally (e.g. periods considered, control variables
included etc.)