1973 oil crisis and subsequent recession
ECON 321: INTERMEDIATE MACROECONOMICS, SECTION 01, WINTER 2022

311 CURTISS HALL
Macroeconomic Report & Presentation Instructions
The final draft of your paper is due Friday, April 22. There is a submission link in Canvas under
“Assignments.” The presentation (and PowerPoint) will be due either Tuesday, April 19 or
Thursday, April 21, depending on when you sign up. The paper is worth 80 points and the in-class
presentation is worth 20 points.
GETTING STARTED
Pick a topic from the sign-up sheet that was sent to your SVSU email. You will want to familiarize
yourself with the macroeconomic event you choose and think about how to apply the theories and
concepts we learned in class. Grading will be based primarily on how well you apply the concepts and
theories. You will also need to provide an overview of the event. Wikipedia may be a good source to
get more familiar with it, but please do not cite Wikipedia. There are usually reliable sources cited in
the Wiki articles that you can refer to. There are also numerous sources online, but stick to reputable
news and academic sources. I’m assuming that you know how to conduct background research on line, but let me know if you need some help with it. You will also need data; a list of reputable sources
is given below. Otherwise, follow the content guidelines. Treat what is listed below as what is a grading
rubric. Make sure you include a list of references in the last page of your report and use parenthetical
notation within the body of the report. Use one of the three main American writing style guidelines
(APA, MLA, or Chicago), and stay consistent throughout.
Content Guidelines: You’ll want to make sure that you do the following in your paper:
• Summarize the event you have chosen. Make sure you are as specific as possible, describing
the main actors and highlighting the most important facts that describe why this event is worth
studying. Find several sources to draw information from throughout this report and cite them.
• Describe your macroeconomic event with the most relevant data. Real GDP is almost always
relevant and easy to obtain. Rates of inflation are important, but you may need to compute
those from a CPI. Unemployment rates are good and so are growth rates in real GDP but you
may need to compute those too. If you need historic data, let me know. The “The Penn World
Tables” listed below have good international macroeconomic data going back to 1950. Other wise if you are looking for data older than 1950, the Maddison project often has it. The St. Louis
Federal Reserve (FRED) has a lot of good national and international data too. All these sources
are linked below.
• Use Excel to create a time-series graph of your data. This is a scatter plot with “year” or some
date in the x-axis and the data of interest in the y-axis. Choose the data that you think works
best. Cut-and-paste the graph into your paper and presentation
• Analyze the topic or problem using one of our theories. By “theories” I am referring the graph ical models and mathematical equations we’ve been looking at.
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• Relate public policy to the topic (e.g. some form of monetary policy, fiscal policy, trade protec tion, commercial policy, international relations, growth policies, investment stimulus, etc.). It’s
likely that you will learn about an actual public policy response when you are studying your
topic. Make sure you are describing what that was.
• Take a policy stance on your topic by deciding if what the governments did in response (or to
cause) to the economic event was appropriate or not. If nothing was done in response, was that
appropriate or not? Try to use as much data as you can to support your stance on the policy you
are interested in.
PowerPoint Presentation: You’ll want to follow these guideline for your PowerPoint presentation:
• The presentation will be in-person to the class. It is only supposed to be about 8 minutes long
and will require that you use PowerPoint to guide the presentation. If you have COVID-related
concerns about coming to class, please let me know and we can find an alternative way to
present. You will present a summary of your paper to the class by explaining the bullet points
of your presentation as you advance from point-to-point and slide-to-slide. Note that the final
draft of the paper is due after the presentation.
• Try to summarize everything in your paper using about 4-5 slides. This way you can spend max
2 minutes talking about each slide. Your job is to avoid simply reading each bullet point. The
bullet points are meant to be discussed and expanded on, not simply read aloud.
GRADING
In the end, a student’s project should contain a concise summary of the topic they chose, an anal ysis of the topic, and a discussion of how a specific economic policy relates to the topic. Economic
data from a relatively unbiased source of information will help your argument. The format should be
intro-body-conclusion.
The ideal paper should accomplish this by accurately using several (more than 3) of our concepts
and at least one theory. The more you use and the more accurately they are used, the better. The data
should support the arguments being made and the paper should be free from spelling and gram matical mistakes. Deviations from this ideal will earn a lower grade. Papers will be graded somewhat
holistically: The paper in its entirety will be considered, but an emphasis on using our concepts and
theories will allow for drops of 1 letter grade or more, depending on how it affects overall quality. Af ter the letter grade is assigned, spelling and grammar will be considered. Spelling and grammar may
cause larger drops in the letter grade should they affect a student’s ability to communicate on a basic
level.
FORMAT
The paper should be 3-5 pages, double-spaced and written using one of the 3 main American styles
(APA, MLA, or Chicago). Be sure to spell-check and proofread. The paper should have an introduc tion in which your thesis statement is laid out and the main arguments are summarized. The body
then should make those main arguments in more detail.
POTENTIAL DATA SOURCES
• The St. Louis Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank (US and International Macro Data):
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https://fred.stlouisfed.org/
• The World Bank – World Development Indicators:
http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicators
• The International Monetary Fund (IMF):
• www.imf.org
• The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER):
www.nber.org
• The United Nations Comtrade Database
• https://comtrade.un.org/
• The Penn World Tables
• www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/
• The Maddison Historical Statistics
• https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
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