Mini Research Proposal on International Trade: Investigating the Impact of Unions on Import Shocks

You only submit research idea that is related to international trade, for obvious reasons. Mini research proposal will be at most 250 words (excluding references). They will feature the following things:

1. A brief description of your research idea
2. Explanation of how it relates to prior literature and what your idea might contribute to this literature
3. A description of the methods to be used
4. A description (brief) of the data you are thinking of using

1. Quality of the Research Idea (10%)
2. Is your idea clearly described, original, and of high quality?
3. Motivation and Contribution (40%)
4. Describing your idea’s motivation and placing it in relation to some prior literature.
5. Appropriateness of Data and Methods (40%)
6. Does your data and empirical method describe sound reasonable given the question?
7. Is it feasible (i.e. possible) for you to do your proposed idea?
8. Writing Quality (10%)
9. How well-written is your proposal?
10. Spelling and grammar will be considered as well.

In the following pages I have created 2 examples of mini research proposals written by me. The first example is what I consider a well-done proposal containing all the parts that I require. The next example is what I consider a less good research proposal. When writing your proposals I would urge you to look at both as examples of what to do (for the first one) and what not to do (for the second one).

Hopefully this will help you avoid what I consider the three most common mistakes people make when they first try and develop research ideas:

1. “I want to look at how trade affects the Canadian economy”
2. Their plans are too unrealistic and/or have no data you can use
3. “I will use the same confidential firm-level data as (insert famous economists here) in their paper”; will you be able to access this data as well, especially given time constraints?
4. “I will look at how import competition affects whether people wear green shirts”; even if this is a good question (it’s not), how would you get data on this?
5. Their question is too poorly motivated
6. Again, “I will look at how import competition affects whether people wear green shirts”; why would you want to look at this question, and what do we learn from this?

I will investigate whether local labour markets that have more unionized workers (who belong in a labour union) respond more negatively to trade shocks than local labour markets with a smaller union presence. I will follow Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013), who examined the effect of Chinese import competition on US local labour markets. Relative to them, my work will tell us whether certain characteristics of regions make them more or less vulnerable to trade shocks.

This could help explain why certain countries such as Norway, as found in Balsvik, Jensen, and Salvanes (2015) and which has a much higher union density, saw a much smaller negativeimpact of Chinese imports, and more generally whether we can better understand why some regions are more resilient to adverse shocks than others. I will take Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013)’s empirical approach and their US data and combine it with American CPS data on the amount of unionization in each region inthe US. I will then run their main regressions separately for regions with high and low unionization to determine whether high-union areas suffer larger consequences (lower wages, employment) than low-union areas, by comparing their import shock coefficients.