The objective of this course is to get you started doing empirical work with R. The skills that you will learn are useful for anyone who does data analysis, and should enhance your prospects of finding a good job.
At the end of the semester you will turn in a paper, written in the format of the typical empirical paper in economics. The analysis must be done in R. I need to approve the topic of your paper, and will ask for a proposal by October 11. Half of your grade will be based on the quality of this paper.
In preparing your proposal, you should first read some ideas for term paper topics.pdf. The format of the paper is sketched out in this MS Word Document: term paper outline.docx. We will talk more about this later, but for now I would like to point out that the easiest way to write the paper would be to use the term paper outline as a template, simply filling in each section as you have time.