The 'Applied Economics Research Course' is the concluding third-year course that builds on the knowledge and skills acquired during the economics study. Students who follow a Bachelor in Economics with an approved optional minor do a research project in which two disciplines are combined: economics and the minor of the student's choice. Other students (without an approved optional minor) do a research project that focuses on a purely economic issue. In most cases, research projects are related to the research programme of one of the participating chairs ('leerstoelgroepen') in economics. Alternatively, a research project that builds on an internship at a research institute, the government, or a company is possible. In all cases the research should meet academic criteria. The project itself can be both theoretical and empirical in focus. The research project will be done together with one other student. Only honours students and students doing an internship are allowed to do the project individually, after permission from the course co-coordinator. In the course, we distinguish combinations of different fields in economics as well as different domains (minor disciplines) from which topics can be selected.

Example research projects from previous years:

	Geography	Law	Social Sciences	History	LUISS	B&O	Without approved optional minor
Organisation	Image and identity of Dutch beer breweries	Comparative analysis of corporate governance codes	International Patterns of Inter-firm Collaboration				venture capital as government instrument
Applied Microeconomics/ economics of the welfare state		Equal opportunities in the labour market for men and women	Group micro-credit and social structures		Gender Diversity in Boardrooms and the Effect on Environmental Awareness and Corporate Philanthropy		Keynes’ animal spirits: what does behavioural economics learn us?
International Economics/ Macro-economics	Airports, competition and market shares   International Business, Entrepreneurship and the international competitiveness of regions	Origin and quality of financial legislation and quality and functioning of the financial system	The development of wage share and income distribution in welfare states in Europe	Can the typical pattern of development of Dutch industry in the 19th century be explained by monetary causes?			Entrepreneurship and economic growth
Finance / Finance and Financial Markets	The (a)symmetry of regional output fluctuations in Italy	Legal systems and recent final crisis	Entrepreneurial orientation at employee level,	The Effects of Real Effective Exchange Rates on Exports and Growth			How are listed firms coping with the crisis?   CEO-characteristics and firm performance
Public Economics		The Optimal Production of Scientific Knowledge and Patents	Social dumping and tax dumping
Theoretical Microeconomics		The internationalization of the legal business	The structure and the evolution of social networks:	Corporate governance			Altruism and reciprocity
Institutional Economics	When regarding spatial entities	Are the Netherlands a tax haven?	Income distribution and the financial crisis			The relationship between the financial crisis in the U.S. and Europe
Entrepreneur-ship and innovantion					Overcoming the Innovation Gap: how to effectively improve innovation in SME’s   Entrepre-neurship Marketing: what do SMEs really do?	Governance for Social Entreprises   Normal or deviant?: anti-social behavior at the workplace	Fairtrade carbon trading

For the 'Applied Economic Research Course' 2014-2015, economic chairs and faculty from the approved optional minor will jointly formulate new research topics.
Students can also submit their own research topic (as a pair) or internship (possibly individually) to the course co-coordinator for approval. Requests need to be submitted before the end of September 2014  and should contain: motivation research question and sub-questions, relation to economic theory, description of the type of research (data analysis, literature, surveys, etc), some references, and estimated time schedule. 

Learning objectives
At the end of the course the student is able to:

• use the key concepts and theories of their field in economics and recognise the institutional, historical and spatial implications in the context of their research question;
• use the comparison with theories to put their research question into perspective or confront the economic concepts with approaches from another field and minor;
• perform simple quantitative and empirical research or theoretical research. In particular, the focus is on the ability to define and formulate a problem, collect, process and interpret data, and present the analysis and chosen direction of resolution.
• All academic skills are focused on in the course.

Format
Workshops, 'supervisie' (supervision) groups, and personal supervision.

Assessment method

• Report (70% of the final grade);
• Presentation of the concept version of the report and feedback given on the concept version of a report written by other students (15% of the final grade);
• Progress reports on the research in the tutorials and feedback given on the progress reports of other students in the tutorials (15% of the final grade).

Effort requirements

• Attendance and participation in all  'supervisie' group sessions;
• Attendance of the compulsory workshops;
• Submission of the provisional and final research plan prior to the deadline;
• A go-decision of the content supervisors based on the final research plan.

Effort requirements are enforced: only in case the course co-coordinator has approved in advance, students can deviate from the above requirements.

Prerequisites

• The student must have 135 ECTS in September of the academic year in which the student wants to follow the Applied Economics Research Course. Before the start of the course the students must at least have passed, 'Econometrics' or 'Advanced Mathematics' and two level 3 courses of which at least one needs to be an economics course;
• Passing degrees for all academic skills.

The 'Applied Economics Research Course' is the concluding third-year full-time course that builds on the knowledge and skills acquired during the economics study. Students who follow a Bachelor in Economics and Business Economics with an approved optional minor do a research project in which two disciplines are combined: economics and the minor of the student's choice. Other students (without an approved optional minor) do a research project that focuses on a purely economic issue. In most cases, research projects are related to the research program of one of the participating chairs ('leerstoelgroepen') in economics. In all cases the research should meet academic criteria. The project itself can be both theoretical and empirical in focus. Supervisors will formulate broad topics on which groups of ten students will do research. The research project will be done individually in project groups. In these project groups students write literature reviews in couples and give feedback on each other. The final research paper is written individually. Students can also submit their own research topic (possibly done as external research) to the course co-ordinator for approval. Requests need to be submitted before the end of February 2015 and should contain: motivation research question and sub-questions, relation to economic theory, description of the type of research (data analysis, literature, surveys, etc), some references, and estimated time schedule. Examples of research topics of recent years include developments in corporate governance; entrepreneurship and economic growth; financial markets and legal systems; airports, competition and market shares; economic development, infrastructure, and regional integration; changing labour market institutions. For the 'Applied Economic Research Course' 2014-2015, economic chairs and faculty from the approved optional minor will jointly formulate new research topics.

• use the key concepts and theories of their field in economics and recognise the institutional and spatial implications in the context of their research question;
• use the comparison with theories to put their research question into perspective or confront the economic concepts with approaches from another field and minor;
• perform simple quantitative and empirical research or theoretical research. In particular, the focus is on the ability to define and formulate a problem, collect, process and interpret data, and present the analysis and chosen direction of resolution;
• reflect on the development and state of the academic skills.

• Research paper (80% of the final grade);
• Participation and feedback in the project group (10% of the final grade);
• Literature review and presentation of this review (10% of the final grade).

• Attendance of and participation in all project group sessions;
• Attendance of the compulsory workshops;
• A pass for the 'position paper personal skills'.

• The student must have 90 ECTS in September of the academic year in which the student wants to follow the Applied Economics Research Course;
• Before the start of the course the students must at least have passed,'Econometrics' or 'Advanced Mathematics' and two level 3 courses of which at least one needs to be an economics course;
• Passing degrees for all academic skills.