Third Year Research Seminar (Part 2)

Ph.D. students in the Field of Economics are required to take this year-long research seminar, and receive a grade of Satisfactory, in order to remain in good standing in the Ph.D. program. Students present and discuss each second-year paper, which must be completed before the semester opens and Economics 7850 meets for the first time. Students also present at least two additional papers or paper plans. These are intended to be part of the core of the student's thesis proposal, which must be given as part of the student's A Exam prior to the start of the fourth year of graduate study in the economics Ph.D. program. Economics 7851 ends with a mini-conference, attended by faculty and other Ph.D. students, in which each student makes a formal presentation in standard economics conference format, and each student discusses one of these presentations. Professional writing and presentation coaching is also provided.

Instructor: Barseghyan, L; Molinari, F; Vilhuber, L

Term: Spring

Location: Various

Time: Irregular

Course Overview

  • Part 1 – Continuation of Lectures

  • By March 1 2026: Provide analysis and scoring for three empirical papers or three theoretical proofs (see below)
  • By March 13, 2026: Submit a referee report on a paper written by a classmate, assigned to you (standard 6 weeks time to write the report).
  • By April 1 2026: Send a working draft of a new paper (i.e., a different paper from what you presented in ECON 7850). A note on co-authorship: Any work that is part of a potentially larger or a different project co-authored with a faculty member should be done independently until the final submission of the ECON 7850 paper (which should be no later than the presentation).
  • By May 5 2026: Send the full paper corresponding to the extended abstract.

Third-year conference (last week of the semester)

  • May 7: All day
  • May 8: morning only

By May 15 (one week after the conference), you are expected to have a draft replication package consisting of a complete README, and ideally programs and data (as allowed). If you cannot provide the programs and data, provide a list of programs and data that you expect to include in the replication package (the list is part of the README).

Your replication package does not need to be the final one, but needs to be reasonably complete

You can share it

  • preferred: using actual archival platforms, in pre-publication mode (“shareable link” on Dataverse, adding us as collaborators on a pre-publication deposit on openICPSR, on the Zenodo Sandbox). Just remember: if you do publish it, it becomes permanent (not necessarily wrong, but may not be what you want)
  • less certain to lead to the desired result: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc. If you do use those, be sure to make a COPY of your actual working directory.

Deliverables

Date Details Due
Sun Mar 1, 2026 Analysis and Scoring due by 11:59pm
Fri Mar 13, 2026 Referee Report due by 11:59pm
Wed Apr 1, 2026 Working Draft due by 11:59pm
Tue May 5, 2026 Full Paper due by 11:59pm
Fri May 15, 2026 Replication Package due by 11:59pm

Enrollment Information

limited to: third-year Economics Ph.D. students or permission of instructor.

Schedule

Week Date Topic Materials
1 Jan 21 Introduction

(Online) First meeting, description of deliverables
2 Feb 2 Reproducibility, transparency, and data ethics

How do you create transparency and credibility when you cannot share the data you use? We discuss strategies both for data collection, data use, and data sharing. This is relevant if you collect your own data, or if you use confidential data.
3 Feb 4 Creating an archive, and why that's a good thing (or how to create a replication package)

We discuss how to set yourself up for reproducibility from the very first day of your project.