Assignment:
•Name one economic issue that you have heard discussed by your friends, coworkers, or on the news that you wish you understood better
•Research this issue. Find three explanations explaining this issue. One should be a video or popular press article, but TWO must be journal articles from ECONOMIC JOURNALS.
•In 500 to 750 words, summarize your findings on this issue.
For our remaining Residency assignments, we will be researching, evaluating, and summarizing several different relevant economic issues.
One problem that is often discussed by those who research economic issues is that many times news stations and popular press type companies miss the important issues, simply misunderstand the issues, or chose to sway the facts to fit a certain viewpoint or bias. Our goal with these remaining assignments will be to take the different prompts given, evaluate their validity using Economic Journal articles and use these to either support or refute (based upon each set of instructions) and then explain this issue in a way that the general public would understand. Often, it appears, that the news that is available to us uses a particular set of information to explain an issue in a way that may or may not be accurate.
Here is an example to help illustrate the goal of this assignment. (This is both a Finance issue and an Economic issue), during the most recent filing period for United States taxes, there was a large amount of focus put on the AMOUNT of refund that people were receiving when filing their taxes. This information (frequent news articles) was being used to try to evaluate whether or not the changes to the tax code for 2018 benefited or hurt tax payers. The problem with this news is that it is actually IRRELEVANT in relation to whether or not the changes to the tax code benefitted or hurt tax payers. The RELEVANT news would be related to the amount of taxes tax payers actually paid, but this information is private so unavailable to reporters.
Your goal with these assignments is to always try to find the RELEVANT information using Economic Journal articles and then evaluate those in relation to published news articles or video news.