Course Description:
The Krogh Honors Seminar, named for Dean Emeritus Peter Krogh, provides the opportunity for a select group of 15 students to work on cutting-edge scholarly research in the area of international affairs.

We will conduct this course as an advanced research lab for quantitative studies of international affairs. Students will work in pairs on an original research project with the ultimate goal of publication. The pairs of students will work as part of a research cluster with students working on related projects. The syllabus below provides, therefore, only a skeleton of our adventure through research. Broadly speaking, the course will address the ways in which international and domestic political institutions impact the production, distribution, and consumption of scarce resources. Proposed research themes include foreign aid, international institutions, democratization, human rights, and independence/separatist movements. The final set of research themes for the course will depend on the choices of the students accepted into the class. As the class projects develop, so will our agenda. We will, for example, read and constructively comment on each other's papers. Clearly, then, students will address questions of international affairs in a research-oriented seminar.

What does it mean to call the course "research-oriented"? At the beginning of the semester, students will have exercises to get them started on their projects. We then will transition into presenting our research to the class, providing drafts to the class to study and comment on. By the end of the semester, students should have a polished draft of a paper suitable for presentation at a research conference. Where you go with your project from there is up to you. Typically it takes me about two years to polish a draft of a paper suitable for submission to a journal. At that point, the paper faces tough (anonymous) reviewers who offer criticism and, ultimately, a judgment about whether to publish the research. Georgetown has decided to offer this advanced research-lab seminar to sophomores with the hope that they might continue working on their projects during their junior and senior years – eventually publishing the finished product. No previous experience is expected of the students – the only prerequisite is a passion for learning. That said, the course has a heavy quantitative component and all projects will involve quantitative data.

Some of readings for the course are special. The research was conducted by undergraduate students just like you! You too can pursue publishable research in international political economy, and your path to this goal can begin in this class...

Note that all research begins with a question, and thus the students should start with a question of their own. The course will then teach the students how to develop an answer to their question (or a hypothesis), and how to test their hypotheses. Sometimes scholars design experiments with strict control and treatment groups. but for many questions in international affairs, we are restricted to considering data provided to us by historical events, which certainly do not represent a random sample. Thus, questions of "non-random" selection will loom large over much of what we consider in this class. From a methodological point of view, we address questions of "endogeneity" and "non-random selection." In other words, we will be concerned with distinguishing the circumstances under which phenomena take place from their inherent effects.

Requirements:

This section has four parts: (1) Short writing assignments, (2) Long writing assignment, (3) Class presentations, (4) STATA, and (5) Research teams. Please read through all four parts carefully.

Note that the course grade will be determined by class participation & attendance – including your presentations and your attention to the presentations of others (35%), short-writing assignments (30%), and the long writing assignment (35%).

(1) Short writing assignments:

Perhaps the most important part of the writing process is the pain of re-writing, and re-writing, and... re-writing. I intend these short assignments to build on each other week by week. For several assignments, you will revisit previous assignments, revising your earlier drafts and adding more material.



• Jan 28: What is your research question? What is your primary dependent variable of interest? (What are you explaining?) What is your primary independent variable of interest? (What do you hypothesize does the explaining?) What kind of "selection" problems do you face? (1-2 pages, double-spaced)
  
  
• Feb 4: Preliminary bibliography! Read 100 abstracts. Make a list of at least 20 academic articles related to your research. (But you don't have to read/study them yet.)
  
  
• Feb 11: Data! What are the, respective, means, medians, standard deviations, minimum values, and maximum values of your main dependent and independent variables? What are the sources of these data? What is the unit of observation (e.g., country-year)? How many observations do you have of each variable? (1-2 pages, double-spaced) CLICK HERE FOR ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
  
  
• Feb 18: Annotated bibliography! Go back to the (at least) 20 academic articles related to your research. Provide a summary sentence linking the main finding of the article to your specific project.
  
  
• Feb 25: Merging data! What is the correlation between your independent and dependent variables?
  
  
• Mar 4: (Preliminary) Presentations! Rough outline: (1) Research question, (2) Hypothesis, (3) Methodology, (4) Results (if any are available), (5) Conclusion (you probably won't have one yet!)
  
  
• Mar 18: Baseline specification! What other factors (control variables) influence your dependent variable? Multivariate regression: Just do it. (Also provide a data table with the descriptive statistics for the full set of variables for your study.)
  
  
• Mar 25: Abstract! You should have one sentence for each of the follow (in this order): (1) Research question, (2) Hypothesis, (3) Methodology, (4) Result, (5) Conclusion (total: 150 words)
  
  
• Apr 4: Put it together! This is really the first draft of the long writing assignment. First drafts are due. So just bring everything together: (1) abstract, (2) introduction, (3) background (remember the annotated bibliography?) (4) descriptive data, (5) multivariate results, (6) conclusion (now you can write one!) NOTE THE DATE. THIS DRAFT IS DUE ON A FRIDAY.
  
  
• Apr 11: Make revisions! Based on the comments you received last class, revise/improve your draft. NOTE THE DATE. THIS DRAFT IS DUE ON A FRIDAY.
  
  
• Apr 22: Final Presentations
  
  

  Nota bene:
  All written assignments are due electronically by 10:15am on the date listed above at my email address: jrv24@georgetown.edu. Assignments should be double-spaced with 12-point font and (at least) 1 inch margins. Please be sure to familiarize yourself with Georgetown’s honor system.

  FOR EACH ASSIGNMENT, YOUR FILE **MUST** BE NAMED:
  
            INAF339_LASTNAME_####,
  
  WHERE "LASTNAME" REPRESENTS YOUR LAST/FAMILY NAME, AND "#" REPRESENTS THE MONTH & DAY.
  
  FOR EXAMPLE, THE FIRST ASSIGNMENT FOR A STUDENT NAMED Joann Gayoung Kim WOULD BE SAVED AS: inaf339_kim_0128
  
  FOR A STUDENT NAMED Sumegh Sodani, THE SECOND ASSIGNMENT WOULD BE SAVED AS: inaf339_sodani_0204

  If you don't name the file exactly as instructed, you may not receive credit (because the file will go astray).

  
  

(2) Long writing assignment (due date May 2):
After you "put it together," I will read your papers very carefully and give it back to you with lots of comments. You should then revise your paper and turn in the final version by May 2.

(3) Class presentations:
You will make two presentations in class (noted above). I will provide detailed instructions on how to structure the presentations, and you will be given strict time limits. The purpose of these exercises is to give you practice for real-life presentations that you will surely make throughout your careers. Highly-successful past students have told me that this aspect of the course has proven the most valuable in advancing them through their careers. Note that the first presentation will involve only a preliminary discussion of your research plans, while the second presentation will involve more substance. Also note that for the first set of presentations, I will grade you more on how you treat your fellow students' presentations than on your own presentation. You should plan to pay attention to the other presentations, of course, and also to pose good questions and provide constructive feedback following the presentations.

(4) STATA:
The university has a site license for Stata. All students should install Stata on their laptops and plan to bring their laptops to class. To install Stata, please click this link and follow the instructions (the link brings you to a full set of instructions for all software available on campus): https://sites.google.com/a/georgetown.edu/uis-docs/computers/purchase/software. Please note that Stata did not make the student copies available for digital download this year so you must go to the UIS Service Desk (G-39 St. Mary's Hall) to get a DVD and license to install the program. If you do not have a laptop and would like to borrow one for class, loaners are available - just ask me about the program. Otherwise, if you prefer to work on a desktop, you can look on in class with a member of your research team. Stata is also available on all computers in the labs on campus.

(5) Research teams:
Time is limited in class. Each week, we will discuss the progress that you are making on your project. In order to provide time for a thorough discussion of each research project, we need to limit the total number. We have 15 students enrolled in the course, and we simply do not have enough time each week to have a thorough discussion of 15 projects. So, students will work in pairs on their specific project, which will be part of a research cluster involving 4-6 students. We'll make good teams in the first weeks as we figure out who will research what questions.

In terms of your professional development, working as part of a team and co-authoring work provide important experiences for the real world.

Electronic data resources useful for the course:

• The World Bank's World Development Indicators (WDI)
  To download, don't choose "download" – first choose "Table," then "table options" (symbol looks like a gear), under orientation choose "custom," set: Country to "Page," Series to "Column," and Time to "Row." Then "Apply Changes," and *now* click "Download."

• The World Bank's World DataBank – the full set of WB datasets (really great!)

• AidData

• The Quality of Government Institute (QOG) – an INCREDIBLE resource that has merged many of the variables that you are looking for all together into one dataset!

• DD

• Polity IV

• OECD Aid Statistics (beware – this webpage is not user-friendly)

• UN Comtrade (really beware – this webpage is really not user-friendly)

WE ARE GLOBAL GEORGETOWN!