Dissertation Workshop
All MSc students in Economics except those taking the MSc in Development Economics and Policy are required to attend the MSc Dissertation Workshop, which will take place on Wednesday 7th December at 2.00pm in Lecture Theatre 3, Stopford.
The workshop will cover the following topics. Students will find it useful if they print out and bring the documents provided in the links below.
1. Introduction
2. Finding a Supervisor and Choosing a Topic
- Guidelines for Supervisors and Supervisees
- Allocation of supervisors
- List of Economics staff and MSc programmes whose students they will supervise
- Dissertation Topics and Supervisors - updated 3 May 2012
- Registration form
- Project Title, Ethics and Risk Assessment form (for adults)
- School Ethical Approval & Safety and Risk Assessment website
- Summary of supervisor's and student's responsibilities
3. Developing your Research Topic
4. Preparing your Dissertation
- Guidance for Presentation of Taught Masters' Dissertations
- Presentation and Format of Dissertations: Summary
- Examples of Dissertation Title and Contents Pages
- Plagiarism, Acknowledging Sources and Referencing Conventions
- Binding and Submission of Dissertations: Summary
5. Concluding Comments
Extra Dissertation Workshop Meetings
First Meeting Thursday 22nd March 12 – 1pm (Humanities Bridgeford Street, G7)
In the first meeting we will discuss what you think would be useful to do in order to support help during the dissertation writing process.
Read the following Table of Contents and Introductions and take notes on what you like and what you don't like about these Introductions. Also note down how clear you are about what is being done in these theses. Have this done before the workshop on 22 May!
Here is the summary of our evaluation.
Week 9 – Thursday 19th April 12 -1 pm
Literature Review:
The task is to write a mini literature review on the following two papers:
Gali J. and Gertler M. (1999) Inflation dynamics: A structural econometric analysis, Journal of Monetary Economics}, 44, 195-222. (here is a version with some comments by myself)
and
Rudd J. and Whelan, K. (2005) New tests of the new-Keynesian Phillips curve, Journal of Monetary Economics, 52, 1167-1181.
When writing the literature review write it imagining that you were to write a dissertation on estimating a New-Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) for the UK. Also assume that prior to covering these two papers in your literature review you have introduced the theory of the NKPC.
Also you should be able to write these literature reviews without necessarily going into (or even fully understanding) all the technical details in these papers.
Enjoy and bring 3-4 copies of your mini Literature Review to the meeting.
A file with some comments following our discussion and my attempts at the mini Lit Review can be found here
Week 10 – Thursday 26th April 12 -1 pm
Some students will give a brief discussion of their research question and how they attempt to tackle it. This will be followed by a discussion.
Potential further dates:
Week 11 – Thursday 3rd May 12 – 1pm
Week 12 – Thursday 10th May 12-1pm