Economics Courses Online

Economics Online:

Guide to Economics Online at BCC

Is an online economics course for you?

Papers for Online Economics Courses

Online Resources for Economics Students

Electronic Reserve Desk for Online Economics (password required)

Gallery of Economists

Online Economics Courses (Introductory Pages):

Economics 100: Survey of Economics

Economics 200: Principles of Macroeconomics

Economics 201: Principles of Microeconomics

Other Links:

Instructor's Home Page

Email Instructor

Distance Education Office (Registration Information)
   

Papers for Online Economics Courses

Bellevue Community College -- Distance Education

Instructor: Kit Sims Taylor


Unfortunately, too few college courses these days require much writing from the students. And too many college students attempt to avoid courses that have a significant writing component. But you learn to write by writing. And you learn to think by writing. More specifically, you learn to think about the economy by writing about the economy.

The assigned papers will give the student an opportunity to explore economic concepts in greater depth than class discussion and/or examinations allow. They also allow the student an opportunity to put into practice what has been learned in English composition courses.

1 -- Instructor's Expectations

Even though the papers for Economics 100, 200 and 201 are short, they are still papers. They are not just a collection of your notes and they are not rough drafts of papers. They are finished papers. They are based on reading, research and thought. They are well organized and have been carefully proofread.

You will post your paper on the course discussion board. Students can -- and are encouraged to -- read each other's papers. While the grade and instructor's notes on your papers will be sent to you privately via the course email, the instructor may point out various positive features of your paper to the other students on the discussion board.

Click here for an example of what your finished and properly formatted paper will look like (requires Adobe Reader 6.0 or higher).

1.1 -- Plagiarism:


  • Plagiarism will be dealt with very seriously in this course. The instructor may send any suspect paper through a plagiarism-checking service.

  • If you don't think you know the difference between plagiarism and the acceptable use of sources, check the University of Indiana site Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It. The criteria that I apply to differentiate between plagiarism and acceptable paraphrasing is spelled out at that site.

  • Plagiarism will result in an F for this course. A copy of the paper containing plagiarism will be sent to the Dean of Students along with a notice of the action that was taken. The Dean of Students may take further action, which can include expulsion. I may also identify the plagiarized paper as such to the other students in the class. And I may also notify the author or copyright holder of the material whose work was so used. Plagiarism is not only a severe violation of academic standards, it is theft of intellectual property and a violation of copyright laws.

1.2 -- Minimum Requirements Include:

Note: Papers that do not meet the minimum requirements will receive a 'no credit' without being graded.


  1. Length -- The body of your paper -- not including the citiation list or any tables or charts -- should be from 1500 to 2000 words in length. If you cannot write a paper on the assigned topic of at least the minimum length, you have not done enough research and/or thinking on the topic. If early drafts of your paper are over the maximum length, you have not put enough thought into distinguishing between what is essential for the paper and what is not. When I get a paper that seems too short or too long, I put the body of the paper through a word count. Papers below 1200 words or over 2500 words will not be graded. Again, that applies to the body of the paper, not including citation lists, footnotes, charts, tables, etc.

  2. Sources -- All papers will utilize sources beyond the assigned reading. Sources must be properly cited. When citing online sources, a URL by itself is not a sufficient citation. See section 4 below on citation requirements. Papers that do not utilize and fully cite appropriate sources will not be graded.

  3. Format, Posting, and Deadlines -- Your paper will be posted as a message in the course discussion board. There will be a specific forum for each paper and the paper must be posted in that forum. The paper must be posted by the assigned deadline.

    There must be a blank line between each paragraph. That will probably not happen automatically when you paste your paper in as different word processors use different codes for paragraph ends, so you will need to learn how to edit your paper on the course discussion board and how to insert blank lines. It is strongly suggested that you learn how to do this well before the first paper is due. Papers without blank lines between paragraphs will not be graded. There must also be blank lines between citation and/or bibliography entries.

    Note that you will paste your paper into the discussion board. If you have the software to create PDF files (Adobe Acrobat), you may post them as PDF attachments. Papers sent as attachments in any format other than PDF will not be graded.

    If you inadvertently click the wrong button and post your paper without completing the formatting (or if you post it in the wrong forum), post it again until you get it right. Do not post it as a reply to your previously posted paper. Then post a reply to each of the incorrect papers requesting that they be deleted.

  4. Proofreading -- Papers riddled with with errors of spelling, word usage and grammar will not be graded.

  5. Topic -- For Economics 100, 200 and 201, each paper will have a specific assigned topic. Papers that do not address that topic will not be graded.

  6. Check Your Paper -- It is the student's responsibility to check the paper after it is posted. If there are formatting errors, etc., you will need to repost it.

1.3 -- The Checklist

This repeats much of what is covered in the section above in a slightly different format -- but I want to leave no doubt about how I decide whether or not to grade your paper. Each paper is subjected to the following checklist:
  1. Was the paper submitted by the deadline? Note that WebCT Vista records the date and time of everything that is posted. Papers not submitted by the deadline will not be graded.

  2. Was the paper pasted into the discussion board? Papers sent as attachments will not be graded.

  3. Is the paper formatted as required? The paper must be single-spaced with a blank line between pargaraphs. There must also be a blank line between each entry in the list of citations and/or bibliography. Papers that do not meet the formatting requirements will not be graded.

  4. Are sources included and properly cited? A URL by itself is not a sufficient citation. See section 4 below on citation requirements. Papers that do not included complete source citations will not be graded.

  5. Does the paper meet the length requirement? If the body of the paper -- not including bibliography, citation list, etc. -- is less than 1200 or more than 2500 words in length, the paper will not be graded.

  6. Has the paper been carefully proofread A paper riddled with errors of spelling, usage, and grammar will not be graded.

  7. Does the paper address the assigned topic? A paper that strays too far from the assigned topic will not be graded.

2 -- Writing a Good Paper

If you haven't written many papers recently, or if you have and they weren't very good, rush to the nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of The Elements of Style (William Strunk and E. B. White). Or order it from:

Read it. Reread it.

When you think your first economics paper is done and ready to be posted into cyberspace, open Strunk and White to "An Approach to Style" and go through it point by point. Then take another stab at improving your paper.

You can get help on writing papers at the BCC Writing Lab.

When grading your paper, some of the things I will be looking for are:

2.1 -- Economic Terminology

You cannot get very far in economics without learning economic terminology. When writing for the general public -- as in a letter to the editor of your local newspaper -- on economic topics, it is best to avoid specialized terminology. But the audience for your papers in this course is myself and the other students. For Economics 100 students, each chapter of my text has a list of the key terms that were introduced in that chapter and each chapter of Heilbroner and Milberg has a section of key concepts and key words. For Economics 200-201 students, there are Key Terms listed at the end of each chapter and a Glossary at the back of the text. Some of these terms, plus some of the terms introduced in earlier chapters, will be applicable to the paper topics.

I expect you to use the appropriate economic terms and to use them correctly. Could you have gained directness, conciseness, precision and/or clarity by using economic terms instead of the more general terms that you did use? Did you use the correct economic term?

2.2 -- Economic Theories and Concepts

Your papers should indicate your grasp of economic theory. That means getting the theory right. It also means knowing which theory to apply and what its limitations are. Theories rely upon assumptions. As one economist -- David Colander -- points out, "if you don't know the assumptions, you don't know the theory." You will not demonstrate your grasp of theory simply by paraphrasing from the textbook -- the best way to demonstrate your grasp of the theory is usually by applying it.

2.3 -- Research

These papers involve research. Research sources for Economics 200-201 students include the Wall Street Journal, other current print media that are available at most libraries and/or reproduced on the internet, and other material accessed via the internet. For current print media, besides the WSJ, I recommend Business Week, the New York Times and The Economist. Economics 100 students do not need to utilize the Wall Street Journal.

You can access the online edition of the New York Times on a daily basis, but cannot get to the business sections of past issues. The Washington Post online edition includes archives for the last two weeks. The Financial Times online version includes archives from the last 30 days. Business majors who expect to work in any business with a global dimension should become familiar with the Financial Times.

Economics Resources on the Internet is a guide with links to internet sources. The web is a useful research tool when used correctly. But it also includes a lot of junk. Anyone can put up a web page and spout on about gold or budget deficits or foreign trade. A good rule of thumb is If you don't know what the source is, don't use it. And some sources must be used selectively. For example, there is a wealth of information on the World Bank's web page. But if the topic of the paper is the World Bank itself, you are not likely to find a balanced evaluation of its environmental record on its own web pages.

2.4 -- Analytical Depth

OK. You know the terms, you've learned the theory and concepts, and your research has turned up interesting cases and data. The tough part is putting them together. Like any science, economics is concerned with causes. Perhaps the paper topic is a comparison of U.S. and Canadian inflation rates over the last five years. You want to explain the differences in inflation in the two countries. This requires a grasp of the leading theories of inflation. Since there are conflicting theories, you will have to explain which one seems to make the most sense.

When I am grading your paper, I will be more impressed if you have obviously considered the several major theories and indicated why you rejected particular ones than if you seem to have grabbed the first theory available without considering the others. Then I will be looking at how far you go with your analysis. If you attribute the difference in inflation rates to difference in monetary policies, I will be looking for your explanation of why different monetary policies were followed.

2.5 -- Organization

Some people can do the research then sit down with their research notes and write a sensible paper without needing to give any thought to organization. But most of us are not so blessed with an intuitive sense of organization. For most of us, the outline precedes the paper.

But don't think of your initial outline as carved into stone. When you actually write the paragraph that started as one line on your outline, you may find that it belongs elsewhere. In the old days we took scissors to the first draft and pasted the paragraphs into a more logical order. Now it is much easier, but we still call it "cut and paste."

2.6 -- Grammar and Usage

Clear writing requires the use of the correct words and of appropriate grammatical constructions. Dictionaries, thesauruses and guides to grammar and usage are not crutches for poor writers; rather they are the everyday tools of good writers.

2.7 -- Directness

Hedge words (perhaps, rather, somewhat, usually, sometimes, maybe, generally, etc.) are sometimes necessary in economics. But if you use them when they are not necessary, you are guilty of excessive caution. Be as direct as the subject allows. By the same token, do not overstate your case.

The same thinking applies to the conclusions of your paper. Certainly it is not a good idea to make claims that are not supported by the evidence and theories. But it is just as unwarranted to become mealy-mouthed in your concluding paragraph after laying out strong evidence throughout the paper.

2.8 -- Proofreading

Don't distract the reader from the content of your paper by letting obvious errors of spelling, punctuation, grammar or word usage drift into your final draft. Remember, the spell-checker in your word processor doesn't know the difference between know and no or between too and two. It usually helps to print out the near-final draft of a paper for a last proofread. For some reason, errors that we miss on the computer screen are more apparent on paper.

2.9 -- Web Considerations

WebCT Vista is Web-based. There are a few things you can do to adapt your paper to this particular medium. One -- which has already been covered and is required is to leave a blank line between paragraphs. Another is to keep your paragraphs short. Sometimes the very logic of the content requires a long paragraph. But more often than not you can break a long paragraph into two or more smaller ones. Smaller paragraphs read better on the Web. Being able to read an entire paragraph without scrolling is helpful to the reader.

William Zinsser's advice on paragraph length is meant to apply to print media, but is doubly important when writing for the Web: "Short paragraphs put air around what we write and make it look inviting, whereas one long chunk of type can disourage the reader from even starting to read. ... You may worry that such frequrent paragraphing will damage the logical development of youridea. ... Don't worry. The gains far outweigh the dangers." [ On Writing Well, Second Edition, 1980, Harper & Row]



3 -- Due Dates

The due date of each paper will be listed on the topic sheet. Other students cannot read your paper if you have not posted it on time. Late papers will not be accepted for any reason. Remember that you can miss one of the first two assigned papers -- for Economics 100, 200, or 201 -- (but if you do both, you will be able to toss out the lowest grade).

4 -- Cite All Sources

All direct quotations must be so indicated. That means enclosing them within quotation marks. If you are proficient in HTML you may want to identify very long direct quotations by giving them extra indentation on both margins and formatting them in a smaller font than the rest of your paper rather than enclosing them in quotation marks.

Note: Some word processors use something called 'smart quotes' or something similar ('smart quotes' is MS Word's name for them) which add the typographical nicety of differentiating between opening and closing quotation marks. Turn off this feature when writing papers for this course -- Web browsers do not recognize smart quotes and may substitute some weird symbol for them.

All material used, whether direct quotations, paraphrased material, facts used, etc. must indicate the source (even if the source is one of the assigned readings). Presenting someone else's work as your own is plagiarism and will result in an F for the course. See the note on Plagiarism near the top of this document.

There are three principles of citation to keep in mind. First, the reader should be able to know the source of your data, facts, ideas and/or quotations. Second, the reader should be able to verify the data etc. and/or locate your source for more information. Third, the originator of a concept and/or the author of a particular item should be credited (and to not do so is a violation of copyright laws).

You can often meet the first criteria by including basic information about your source in the body of your paper. For example, you may be writing about the trade policy of the Clinton Administration. A statement from the Commerce Secretary (quoted in a New York Times article) provides a concise statement of the goals of U.S. trade policy. Introduce the quotation by indicating that is from Mickey Kantor, Secretary of Commerce. You might write: Mickey Kantor, Clinton's Secretary of Commerce, denied that the administration was trying to achieve any pure form of free trade: (the quotation follows).

If you have previously "introduced" Kantor in your paper, you won't need to include his title. If it is not obvious, always provide the context of any fact or statement that you use.

Now for the second criteria. Since you presumably did not interview Kantor yourself, you need to indicate where you found the statement. Your reader may want to check to see if Kantor really said that; or your reader may want more information than you have provided in your paper. This is where the citation comes in.

4.1 -- Citation Format

There are a number of ways to provide the citation. Unfortunately, the electronic paper-posting system that we are using still has a few limitations, so your citation method in this course will have to follow the specific format that is spelled out here. You will need to put aside the marvelous footnoting capabilities of your favorite word processor.

In the text of your paper, directly after the quoted or paraphrased material, or after any material for which you need to provide a citation, simply enter a reference number in square brackets. It will look like this: [1]. At the end of your paper, in a section titled "Notes" or "Sources" you will provide the basic information on the source. Your entry might look like:

[1] Sanger, David. "Standing by His Man in Role After Role: Mickey Kantor, Gutsy Campaigner, Has Smoothed Clinton's Path." The New York Times, November 2, 1996.

Note that the citation contains author, title (of article), name of publication and date of publication. Also note the conventions that should be followed. The article title is in quotation marks. The publication title (or book title) is in italics.. If you accessed the source electronically, you must also include the URL and the date that you accessed the material.

You should always use the square brakets [ ] for these. Then you still can use regular parentheses ( ) for parenthetical expressions, numbers in lists, etc. Do not use the angle brakets -- the less than and more than symbols -- as these symbols ( < and > ) tell your Web browser to treat anything included within them as a formatting command. To even reproduce them here required some special coding. Their inadvertant use can really mess up your paper. Don't use the curly brackets either, as they sometimes launch javascript actions.

If you have a second citation from the same article, simply use the same reference number [1] again. And don't worry about the order of the reference numbers in the body of your paper. Perhaps on the third draft of your paper you add an interesting quotation to your opening paragraph and need to cite it. There is no reason to to go back and renumber all of the citations (a process that often leads to errors). Just give the new citation the next reference number available. If the first reference number in your text is [3] or [5], no matter. The reader can still scroll to your notes section and find the source.

The example above is for a newspaper article. If you are citing a longer source, such as a book or a long magazine article, you will also need to provide a page number. The easiest way is to include the page number with the reference number but separated from it by a colon. For example, the citation indicator in the text of your paper is [3:159] and the citation listed in your "Notes" section reads:

[3] Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg. The Making of Economic Society, Tenth Edition. 1998, Prentice Hall.

The reader can turn to page 159 of the Heilbroner/Milberg text and find your source. If you cite something else from the same book, just use the same reference number with the appropriate page number: [3:114]. Don't include page numbers when citing newspaper articles as they are not consistent. A Wall Street Journal or New York Times article, for example, might appear on different pages in different regional editions of the paper.

Citing online sources presents some other problems. Be certain to include the full URL. Some web sites -- the World Bank site for example -- are labyrinths of internested pages and if you only cite the World Bank's home page your reader may not be able to find your source. You still have to include other information about the source (author, title, date of publication, name of organization or periodical) -- a URL by itself is not sufficient. If you cannot identify the organization that publishes that web page, you cannot consider it to be a reliable source.

Also include the date that you accessed the site, as web pages are often here today and gone tomorrow. When a particular Web page is imporant to your paper it would be a good idea to make and keep an electronic copy of it, as the author of that Web page might change it at any time.

5 -- Reliability of Sources

All sources are not equal. You will also need to pay attention to the reliability and accuracy of your sources.

5.1 -- Data, Facts, and Opinion

The data and facts that you use in your papers for this course should generally come either from statistics-gathering agencies -- such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, Statistics Canada, the World Bank, etc. -- or from news articles in respectable media.

Perhaps your paper includes the following sentence:

Although the February unemployment rate of 4.2 percent was no different from the January rate, employment in the manufacturing sector fell by 94,000 [3].


If your source was the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web page, your citation entry would look like:

[3] Bureau of Labor Statistics. "The Employment Situation News Release," March 9, 2001. URL: http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm Accessed March 16, 2001.


Note that the author in this case is the agency. You may have to dig a bit for the date. And this is one of those cases in which it is a good idea to keep an electronic copy of that particular web page as anyone going to the same URL on April 6 will find the March unemployment report rather than February's.

If you took the data from the article reporting on the unemployment rate in the Wall Street Journal, your citation entry would be:

[3] Ip, Gregg. "Job Growth Accelerated in February, Stabilizing Unemployment at 4.2%," Wall Street Journal (electronic edition), March 12, 2001.


In this case there is an actual human author listed. If the newspaper or other media source does not give the author(s) a byline, then the newspaper itself will be indicated as the author in your citation. If your source was the online edition of the newspaper, you need to indicate that in your citation as well -- for some reason article titles often vary from the print to the electronic edition even when the content is exactly the same (this seems to be standard practice at the Wall Street Journal). And keep an electronic copy -- access to the electronic archives varies from one newspaper or magazine to another (and also seems to keep changing for any given newspaper). Perhaps you used this article for the first paper in Economics 200 and you want to use something else from it for the final paper. But by then it is more than 30 days old and you will need to pay to access it.

You need to be much more careful when utilizing facts and data from other sources. In the Wall Street Journal, for example, the news articles are reliable sources of information. But the editorials and Op-Ed essays are not. The Op-Ed essays represent the opinions of their authors and the editorials represent the opinions of the editors. While the authors and editors rarely fabricate data out of whole cloth, they may pick data selectively in order to bolster their cases. They sometimes take facts out of context and/or process them in ways designed to mislead the reader.

One problem is that facts do not speak for themselves. Every piece of economic data must be viewed in a context. Charlatans and sloppy thinkers use the data but leave out the context and/or the appropriate reference points.

Of course you can use Op-Ed articles and editorials as sources: just keep in mind what they are a source for. If there is an Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal by Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan you can certainly consider it a reliable source for the views of Mr. Greenspan. Or you might cite something from a Wall Street Journal editorial because their editorials are influential. Just be sure that your paper is clear on what it is you are citing and why you are citing it. Perhaps you are writing a paper for Economics 201 on labor issues in international trade. You write:

Advocates of unrestricted free trade oppose corporate concessions to groups who wish to make meeting some minimal labor standards a requirement for access to U.S. markets. The editors of the Wall Street Journal argued that Starbucks' attempt to placate the "Birkenstock brigade" by offering its Fair Trade labeled coffee is bad economics: "The brilliance of Starbucks has been to appreciate that what's really going on in its little world has nothing to do with economics or health and everything to do with fashion." [4]


Your citation will be:

[4] The Wall Street Journal (editorial). "Sleepless in Seattle," March 28, 2001.
Note that it is clear from your paper that you are reporting on the editorial opinion of the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps you agree with that opinion and will be arguing in your paper that labor standards for international trade are counterproductive. Or perhaps you will be arguing that labor standards for international trade are necessary both to protect the existing labor standards in rich countries and to advance the economic development of the poorer countries -- you may think the editors of the WSJ are idiots, but you recognize that they are very influential idiots and your paper will fairly describe the free trade arguments before carefully explaining why you reject them.

6 -- Writing About Numbers

We use a lot of statistics in economics. It is important to use them correctly and clearly. Be particularly careful with growth rates of something expressed in monetary units. If you are using a figure on wage growth over a ten-year period, for example, there is a major difference between figures that are corrected for inflation (real wage growth) and figures that are not (nominal wage growth). And when you state a figure as a percentage, be certain that it is clear what it is a percentage of! If you write "Safeway's profit last year was only 2 percent" you need to indicate what it was 2 percent of. Two percent of sales? Two percent of invested capital? Two percent of the market value of its stock?

When using numbers, you also need to pay attention to the definitions of the particular data that you are using. For example, students in Economics 200 will learn a lot about how we measure the total output of an economy, our Gross Domestic Product, or GDP for short. GDP measures the output of the economy in billions of dollars per year. The sloppy student writes "GDP in the 3rd quarter was 3.5%" and gets a lower grade on the paper than the careful student who writes "GDP grew in the 3rd quarter at a 3.5% annual rate." 3.5% in this example is the growth rate of GDP, not the GDP itself, which will be a figure like 8,753 billion dollars (or, perhaps, reported and rounded off a bit as 8.75 trillion dollars).

Be extremely careful with numbers in economics papers. Don't let an otherwise good paper become substandard due to insufficient proofreading. Numbers -- like GDP growth rates, money supply growth rates, etc., are usually essential to your paper. Typos in numbers are not as apparent to the reader as typos in text usually are, and something as simple as getting the decimal point in the wrong place can leave a central point of your paper off by a factor of 10 or 100 or even more.

Numbers between -1.0 and 1.0 are easier to read (and to proofread) when you use a leading zero. For example, the GDP growth rate for the 3rd quarter of 2001 (from the preliminary report) was -0.4 percent. If you write that "real GDP shrunk by .4 percent," it is too easy to type 4% instead and miss the error when proofreading. 0.4% is much clearer.

Always use the same number of decimal places as was used in the source report. If, for example, the GDP report indcates a growth rate of 4.0 percent, it is not correct to write it as 4 percent. Four percent is a number anywhere between 3.5 percent and 4.5 percent; 4.0 percent is a number between 4.05 percent and 4.15 percent. Also, if you do any of your own processing of numbers, round of the results to the same number of decimal places as was in the original data.

7 -- Posting Your Paper

You will be pasting your paper into the discussion board. This means that you cannot use the fancy formatting commands of your full-featured word processor. If you write your papers on MS Word or a similar word processor, it is best to save it in simple text format (with a .txt suffix). Some Microsoft programs call this text only. Do not use the "text only with line breaks" setting -- that can surely cause problems.

Then copy the paper to your clipboard, go to the course discussion board, open a new message in the correct forum, and paste your paper in. Be sure to put the title in the subject line. Before you post it, however, use the preview feature. You might find that the paragraphs run together. Papers without a skipped line between paragraphs are very hard to read. In this case you will need to enter extra ENTERs between the paragraphs. If you post your paper with the paragraphs run together it will not be graded. Keep using the preview feature of the discussion board until your paper looks right.

After you post your paper, check it again.. If it still has formatting errors, you will need to repost it.



 
If this page is garbled you need
a newer browser. Go to either
 or
to download an up-to-date
browser. They are free.


Go to:

Top of Page | Bellevue Community College | BCC Distance Education | Economics 100 | Economics 200 | Economics 201 | Professor Taylor's Home Page