Projects in economics, sociology, and data science - S2

Objective

The ENSAE curriculum is rich and heavily focused on the learning of methods and theories. The time has come to put this knowledge into practice by inviting students to design, develop, and showcase their own empirical research project.

As part of this module, students will:

• Define a research question on their own,

• Justify the relevance of this question by explaining how it fits into the existing academic literature,

• Find the data that can shed light on their question by searching existing data repositories, identifying which variables are essential or desirable for the analysis, and determining at what level (individual, aggregate?) the data should be available,

• Reflect on the alignment between the empirical strategy, the data, and the research question,

• Where applicable, assess the validity of identification strategies underlying different methods,

• Present and defend their work at various stages of development, explain the choices made, incorporate feedback, and revise their work accordingly,

• Apply to real-world data the data science and econometric methods covered in other modules,

• Connect theoretical considerations (from their own field) with empirical analysis,

• Write a concise, clear, and well-motivated paper to present the project and its findings,

• Create a short video based on their work.

Planning

In the first semester:

• 2 full-class sessions to introduce the expectations, define the interactions between research question, methodology, and data, and to guide students toward their project.

• 4 group sessions to work in detail on the projects.

In the second semester:

• 2 full-class sessions to discuss research practices, how to write and maintain clean and functional code, and writing methods.

• 4 additional group sessions.