Design a research question related to the field of development and rural economics.

File 1 – PDF report (4-5 pages max. not including appendices) Your PDF report must follow the following structure: 1) Research Question – Design a research question related to the field of development and rural economics. 2) Literature – Find 1 to 2 scientific articles related to your research question. In one paragraph, summarize the key findings and elements. 3) Hypothesis – Construct a hypothesis that you will test. You can come up with more than one hypothesis. Justify how you came up with the hypothesis (e.g., previous results from scientific articles). 4) Data – Find data to answer your research question and test your hypothesis. You are free to use the data of your choice. However, you must use a reliable data source (e.g., World Data Bank or FAO). The dataset must be traceable and publicly accessible. Please use cross sectional data and limit the data frame to 5 variables max. In this section, you must also describe the data. Provide detail on the source, the time period, population, and aggregation of the chosen data. Also describe why you chose the variables and provide a variable dictionary (see example below). Please place the variable dictionary at the end of the report as an appendix. The appendix will not be accounted for in the page count. 5) Data analysis – You must do some preliminary analysis of the data to answer your research question and test your hypothesis. You are free to analyze the data however you see fit. You can provide graphs, descriptive statistics, statistical tests, and econometric analyses. All the analyses must be done in R (see R file below). For each result/graph, provide a detailed interpretation and relate it to your research question. One important note for this section is to keep it simple and clear. You will not be graded on the complexity of the analysis, but rather on how pertinent your analysis is to test your research question/hypothesis and how well you can interpret the results. a. Provide descriptive statistics on your data, either with graphs and/or summary statistics. Provide an interpretation. b. Detail the empirical approach you will use to test your research question/hypotheses in one to two paragraphs. Provide a justification for your approach. c. Perform a statistical test/econometric analysis and interpret the results. File 2 – R Script This file must contain your complete script to clean and analyze your data. Some guidelines for this file: • The script must be clean and easily readable. Ensure that you get rid of any codes that are not central to your analysis or that are not used in your final report. • Comment your code extensively. Make sure that someone who opens your code can easily understand and execute all the commands. • Make sure that your script is fully functional and that there are no errors. An outsider must be able to open your script and run it entirely without an error. Note: if your script does not run without an error, points will be deducted. • Make sure that the data file loaded on R (i.e., data downloaded from sources online) is not modified using any other software beforehand. An outsider must be able to go online, download the dataset, load it on R, and run your script. File 3 – Data file This file can be Excel, CSV, … It must be the file that you upload on R to clean and analyze, with the path name correctly set to the file name. If you are planning to use more than one data source, please limit yourself to max. 3. In this case, the dataset combination/merge must be done on R (i.e., import datasets on R and combine using a command in the script). Submission guideline Your assignment must be submitted by July 19th, before 23:59. For the submission, you must follow this exact procedure: 1) Create a file that contains your PDF report, R script, and dataset. The names must follow this structure: • PDF report: LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_QRM_report.pdf • R Script: LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_QRM_script.R • Data: LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_QRM_data.(extension depends on file) 2) Name the file containing the 3 required files: LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_QRM_assignment 3) Compress the file into a .zip. You should have: LASTNAME_FIRSTNAME_QRM_assignment.zip

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