Econ 423
Fall 2003
Group Project

Overview: The group project is designed to give students practical experience in report writing, oral presentations, data collection and manipulation, and basic forecasting.  The project is a role playing exercise where each group will play the part of a team of economists who must write a report (or Memo) and give a briefing to the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.   Each group will be assigned a key economic variable, which will be the focus of the Memo and briefing, from the following list: Aggregate Income and Production, Prices, Interest Rates, Inventories and Factory Orders, Employment, International Trade and Exchange Rates, Monetary Aggregates, Productivity.

The group project is composed of two parts: an FOMC Memo (a written report) and a briefing (an oral presentation).  The Memo will count for 60% and the briefing 40% of the each groups' grade on the project.  Each member of the group will be surveyed to determine the extent of participation in the project, and this will be used to determine the grade on the project.

Description of Main Elements:

Memo

The FOMC Memo prepared by each group can be no more than five double spaced pages of text.  Graphs and tables should be attached in an appendix.  The Memo should be written in clear, concise language.  The Memo should include, at minimum, the following elements:

  1. Description of data sources.
  2. Discussion of possible limitations of the data.
  3. Discussion of the importance of this data in the context of macroeconomic theory.
  4. Summary of recent behavior of the data.
  5. A forecast of the behavior of the data for the next quarter and next four quarters, along with a discussion of the forecasting technique used.
  6. Discussion of the economic implications of the forecast.
The rough draft is due Wednesday, November 26th at 5pm. The final Memo is due on Wednesday, December 10th at 5pm.
 

Briefing

Each group will be allotted 10 minutes for the presentation.  There will be a 5 minute question and answer period following the presentation.  Groups may use any audio/visual aids at their disposal.  The briefing should be organized around the same elements as the Memo, but the briefing cannot simply consist of reading the Memo aloud.

The briefings will take place during the scheduled final exam period, Monday, December 15th from 6:00-8:00pm. Room TBA.