Assignment

Provide a 500 word rationale and outline of your research project (i.e., introduction).

Outline your specific research question(s) and your main aims and objectives (i.e., what do you hope to establish with your research?) and state the contribution of your project to research in this area.
(500 words).

Provide a detailed description of your chosen research method and design. This should include a description of how you are going to gather the information (data) and how you are going to analyze it.
(500 words)

Using literature identified provide a500 word sample of your literature review.

List 12relevant journal, professional publications or policy documents, etc. that will be used within your project. This should be presented in a reference list format (Harvard style).

Qusetion:

An Analysis of the Causes of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

What we learn from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis?

MSc Dissertation Getting Started Notes: (Quantitative Research)

One way to do a dissertation (other ways can also produce good work):

1. To get started collect 12 academic research papers (i.e. journal articles) that relate to your chosen research topic area.

2. You may find that a lot of academic papers are written in jargon that is hard to understand and uses techniques which are well beyond your comprehension. If in doubt, read the abstract and the conclusion and try to pick out the main points without getting bogged down in technicalities.

3. A good starting point is scholar.google.com

4. There's quite a useful list of key papers in finance the reading room at www.altruistfa.com.

5. Read and critically analyse and evaluate these papers.

6. Remember that critical analysis is not just description. It is the ability to reduce a subject to its key points, to justify the choice on logical and empirical grounds and to be able to say where the weaknesses are in the current approach and where further work is needed.

7. Identify the key issues, debates, controversies and so on that appears in the articles.

8. Write them down as bullet points.

9. Write up a review (mini literature review) of these papers.

10. Reflect on what you have uncovered.

• What seemed to you to be the key issues?

• What issues would sustain your interest long enough to write a dissertation on the subject?

11. From this decide on a research focus, aims and objectives. Write them down.

• Keep these realistic. E.g. can you collect all the information you need on time?

• Also, try to be specific and avoid vagueness. There's nothing wrong with keeping things more general earlier on in your enquiry, but now is the time to ‘sharpen things up'. Hence -

12. Establish specific research question(s).

13. Think about how you are going to achieve your aims/objectives and answer your research question(s).

14. How good are your quants? Do you fully understand the technique you intend to use? Try a ‘dry run' with a mini data set, so that you are clear that what you plan is achievable.

15. Quantitative approaches that are typically taken by undergraduates would be, a) Accounting.

b) The use of statistical methods to examine a particular data set.

c) The examination of risk-return using portfolio theory CAPM etc.

16. We do get the occasional student who wants to look at more exotic quantitative areas, such as derivatives or bond durations. This is fine if you are sure of your mastery of these areas.

17. Go to the research method and design literature and investigate which approach is most suitable for your project. For example, basic quantitative data analysis can be done using standard statistical approaches. If you plan to use anything more sophisticated, for example, neural networks, what do you think is the additional benefit?

18. How are you going to collect the data?

• Is it freely available on the internet, or through one of the financial databases available in the University?

• Will data need to be specially collected from organisations or within companies? If so, can you be sure it will be available on time?

19. Within the research method chapter you must explain and justify your chosen method and design and relate it to the research method literature.

20. Once your research method and design has been decided you can produce a working draft of your research methods chapter.

• Note: this must be refined once the research is completed to ensure that it does explain and relate to what you did.

21. Continue to collect your background literature/ and or any other documents that you need to complete your literature review.

22. At the same time organise contacts and set up a schedule for collecting your empirical data.

23. Read and critically analyse and evaluate the rest of the literature review papers.

24. Complete your literature review chapter.

25. Start collecting data.

26. Organise data and start critically analysing and evaluating it.

27. Write up findings.

28. Write up discussion of findings and critically analyse and evaluate these in relation to the literature etc utilised as the underpinnings of your research.

29. Write a conclusion.

30. Assemble first draft of complete dissertation.

31. Rework and redraft where necessary.

32. Check spelling and grammar.

33. Check all tables, diagrams, appendices' etc.

34. Check references and bibliography.

35. Have it proof read before submission.

• Please note: Your dissertation supervisor will not proof read your completed dissertation prior to submission. Your supervisor will only provide comments on one chapter.

One final observation, some students opt for an extended literature review or questionnaire based research.

If you want to opt for the former type of dissertation, you have to provide a high quality of comparative analysis and awareness beyond mere reporting of things you have read in order to achieve a mark beyond the 2:2 range.

In questionnaire-based approaches, the quality of your interviews counts. Interviews of fellow students or people in the street are not terribly impressive.

Also the vast majority of students who opt for this kind of dissertation seldom show any awareness that they are engaged in collecting a sample.

They show no recognition that they understand the difference between samples and populations and have a tendency to present their figures as universal truth, rather than estimates with associated confidence intervals. This greatly detracts from their assessed mark.