Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman

Faculty of Business & Finance

Department of Economics
May Trimester, 2015/2016
UBEZ3013 RESEARCH METHODS
Assignment 1: Article Review
This assignment will carry 20% of the total Unit assessment.
The student should read, understand, and analyse the chosen article with the following
questions in mind. Each question carries maximum of 10 marks.
a. What question(s) does this paper ask? (Problem Statements and/or Research
Questions; Objectives)
b. Why is this an important (set of) question(s)? (Significance and/or Contribution
of Research)
c. What are the results and implications of the paper? (Major findings; Policy
implications; Limitation/Recommendation for future research)
There are SIX articles related to different areas of economics and finance, i.e. labour
economics, Environmental economics, international economics, financial economics,
banking and finance, and empirical finance. The list is in the Appendix.
Students from each assignment group will choose an article randomly to work on this
assignment. It entails a presentation in Tutorial 4 and submission of hard copy of the
final report in Tutorial 4 as well.
The articles can be downloaded from ScienceDirect online database subscribed by
UTAR. To download, please follow these steps:
1) Go to UTAR homepage: www.utar.edu.my
2) Click Library/Online Resources under facilities & resources, then click Edatabases.
3) Under the list, select ScienceDirect, then key in journal title, volume, issue and
page information.
There are two parts to this assignment.
1. Type up your answers to each of the three questions above [(a) to (c) as above].
(Total: 30 marks)
2. In Tutorial 4, students will spend 10 minutes describing their article in the class.
This presentation should clearly address each of the questions above.
INDIVIDUALLY-ASSESSED ORAL PRESENTATION APPLIES (20 marks)

The final output must be type-written using Font 12 Times New Roman, single
spacing. Spells check your document. Print double-sided. STAPLE your final copy.
DO NOT cover with any cardboard. Together, we try our best to preserve the
1

environment without compromising the quality of our work. The final copy of this
assignment shall be submitted for grading in Week 4 during the tutorial.
Appendix
Article on Labour Economics
Djajic, S., & Mesnard, A., (2015). Guest workers in the underground economy. Labour
Economics, 35, 53-62.
Article on Energy Economics
Block, A. S., Righi, M. B., Schlender, S. G., & Coronel, D. A., (2015). Investigating
dynamic conditional correlation between crude oil and fuels in non-linear
framework: The financial and economic role of structural breaks. Energy
Economics, 49, 23-32.
Article on International Economics
Zulkhibri, M. (2015). Interest burden and external finance choices in emerging markets:
Firm-level data evidence from Malaysia. International Economics, 141, 15-33.
Article on Financial Economics
Hugonnier, J., & Prieto, R., (2015). Asset pricing with arbitrage activity. Journal of
Financial Economics, 115, 411-428.

Article on Banking & Finance

Ahmad, S., & Valente, G., (2015). Understanding the price of volatility risk in carry
trades. Journal of Banking & Finance, 57, 118-129.

Article on Empirical Finance

Tsai, H. J., & Wu, Y., (2015). Bond and stock market response to unexpected dividend
changes. Journal of Empirical Finance, 30, 1-15.