My Paper Is Done.

LSE Econometrics students don't write a thesis. Instead they write an "extended essay" that counts for half of the grade for one of their four courses. I submitted my paper on Monday with the weighty title of "Matching CEX Consumption Moments With Bayesian Learning of Heterogeneous Income Profiles". Read it if you dare.

I have mixed feelings about it. On the plus side, it was the first time I brought a research idea that was all my own from conception to fruition. I think it was ambitious for a six week project, and I managed to get results with my own code and data. I did go beyond simply replicating someone else's results, which can be difficult to do at the Master's level. I think overcame significant obstacles on the computation side. (Which is to say that managing to do anything computationally intensive with LSE resources is an accomplishment in itself.) And, finally, this is my first ever economics course, so maybe the world will be lenient with me.

On the negative side, this is exactly the kind of economics research that I dislike. I am essentially studying a mathematical model rather than the real world. The assumptions of the model I chose are excessively removed from reality (it is a very similar model to the one I complained about in an earlier post, "Do You Make Your Consumption Decisions This Way?"). And my conclusions are particular to this model in this configuration, without any clear way of relating it to similar problems.

I guess the lesson is that it's easy to complain about the way economics research is done but hard to do better, at least not the first time you try, anyway.

Now that I'm going to start working after graduation, I won't have time to take this further. But if anyone else is inclined, I have available a very nice, modular, thoroughly commented matlab code base to do all the stuff in this paper...