1. Introduction to Labour Economics

KAT.TAL.322 Advanced Course in Labour Economics

Nurfatima Jandarova

August 25, 2025

Requirements to research proposals

A very specific research question

Vague

How benefits affect students?

Specific

How does the transition from housing allowance to housing supplement affect graduation timing of students?
Important for overall society
- How answering your research question can improve our lives?
Aims at novel evidence and understanding of the problem
- The question may be “old”, but studied from a new angle

The research question (RQ) should be very specific!

Generic form of RQ is “How does X affect Y?”
Make sure that X and Y are very specific concepts.
An example of a vague RQ is “How does reduction in benefits affect students?”
Trying to answer this question can quickly become overwhelming. There may be different types of benefits that students receive, each with different amounts and different conditions. There are, definitely, myriads of student outcomes: do they work while studying, what kind of grades they receive, how many classes they attend, how they fare in exams, do they do summer internships, do they change fields or universities, what kind of jobs they find after graduating, how fast do they find jobs after graduating, etc.
Typically, when we start thinking about the topic, we all start from a general question like the one in the example. You can definitely make it more specific by trying to narrow down X and Y as much as possible.
A more specific version of RQ in the example could be “How does reduction in housing allowance affect graduation timing of students?” or even better “How does the transition from housing allowance to housing supplement affect graduation timing of students?”
When you formulate a sufficiently specific research question, it makes the following steps much easier to think about!

In addition to being specific, research question should be relevant!

You are expected to demonstrate the importance of the particular question to the overall society.
- Why answering your RQ is important? How could the society benefit from the answer?
- For example, the importance may be measured in monetary terms. In the example with housing allowance, the government enjoys immediate benefit in form of reduced spending, but may suffer in the future if students don’t graduate on time or drop out of universities, and subsequently, have lower earnings. Lower earnings means that government would receive lower tax revenues. You can demonstrate the relevance of this tradeoff by computing share of housing allowance in total government spending vs share of income tax of university graduates in total government revenue.
- The importance may also be measured in the proportion of population affected by the issue of interest. For example, if you want to study gender pay gap, you can use the argument that women constitute half of labour force. So, by lowering the gender pay gap, the total income in the economy could considerably go up.
- By and large, there is no specific model to follow. Think about why you are interested in this question, why other people might be interested in this question, how it can improve our lives.

It should also be novel!

A RQ that has already been definitively answered in the existing literature is not novel.
However, you can use past research papers for your proposal project. In this case, you must justify the necessity for re-evaluation.
- For example, a new data with previously unavailable key variable is published which would allow for a more direct or precise estimates.
- Or there was a similar policy change but in opposite direction (like tax cuts or tax raises), so there is a question if economic agents react symmetrically.
- Or population characteristics have changed since that paper was published in a way that underlying model assumptions may have changed. For example, you want to compare effectiveness of offline and online job posts and the most recent paper to look into it used data from early 2000s. You may argue that internet penetration has increased significantly since then and that it changes the relative cost and benefit parameters of each channel of job search.
It is unacceptable to copy an existing paper without making or justifying any changes.