Deliverables one (Week 6): Research proposal

Learning Goal: I’m working on a python project and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

During this course, you will focus on designing and executing your own research paper. This is an individual paper with three deliverables, with the final goal to publish the research paper in a peer-reviewed journal. You will have opportunities to iterate and revise your work based on peer and instructor feedback.

1. Deliverables one (Week 6): Research proposal
2. Deliverables two (Week 10): A draft report including your progress on the researcj.
3. Deliverables three (Final Week): Complete research paper.

The learning outcomes of the research paper are:

• Synthesize algorithms and data from different sources to produce business results and knowledge.
• Write a research paper that has the potential to publish in a peer-reviewed journal.

While achieving these two outcomes we will also be able to do.

• Research a topic relevant to the field of FinTech.

• Demonstrate understanding of research methods.
• Learn how to systematically approach a problem to find a solution and implement your idea/solution in a programming language, e.g., Python.

This is a semester-long project and weighs a significant portion of your total grade (40%). Therefore, I expect you to take the project seriously and work toward it throughout the semester. In this project, you will use the knowledge and insights learned from the scholarly paper discussed in the class to write a scholarly paper for yourself. You are free to work on any topic related to FinTech that interests you. At the end of this document, I provide some ideas and suggestions. You are welcome to work on those ideas if they interest you. I encourage you to try developing your own algorithms/methodology/technique but you are also free to use existing methodology/algorithms/techniques. While deciding on the research project, please consider the availability of the data. A number of good FinTech-related data are publicly available. You can also use yahoo finance/ google finance to access stock market data. NJIT has Bloomberg subscriptions. You are welcome to use “Ray Cassetta Financial Analysis Lab,” situated on the CAB first floor, to access data from Bloomberg. Bloomberg provides a large assortment of proprietary financial data, including the stock market, bond market, forex, ETF, financial news, and many more. If you are interested in any other proprietary data, e.g., WRDS, CRSP, or COMPUSTATE, you can consult me, and we can try to find a solution for that too.

Research Proposal:

The first deliverable is the research proposal. The project proposal should address the research question/s and clearly define the problem you intend to solve. In addition, the motivation and expected contribution of the work. Consider the proposal as your research plan that contains your hypothesis, prospective dataset, proposed methodology to analyze the data, and an outline of a model checking framework that you will use to evaluate results. Finally, the proposal should also discuss the current state of the literature on the selected research problem and identify the research gap. Therefore, before writing your research proposal, I suggest you do an extensive literature review on the research topic/problem and choose the one that interests you most and suits your expertise.

There is no page limit for the proposal. I value quality over quantity. However, a good proposal for a graduate course like this should be about 6-12 pages. The instruction is provided at the end of this document.

Progress Report:

You should submit a progress report to keep me up-to-date with your progress on the research project. It should be similar to your final report except with incomplete results and discussion. The progress report should consist of an initial analysis and results. It may also include any challenges you encountered while working on the project. That will allow me to give you some suggestions and pointers to overcome those challenges.

Final Paper:

The final paper you submit should be par standard to the first draft of a scholarly manuscript. Just imagine you are submitting the paper to a reputed journal for consideration for publication. It should clearly define the problem you intend to address, discuss your proposed solution, and how it improves our current understanding of the subject. It should also discuss the major contributions of your work, the data and methodology you used, and detailed experimental results and discussion. In the final paper, you should be able to reuse a lot of the material from your proposal. For general organizational guidelines for your paper, you should follow the published scholarly papers we discussed in class. A good example is Rossi, Blake, Timmerman, Tonks, and Wermers, Network centrality and delegated investment performance Journal of Financial Economics 2018. To give you a better idea, the final paper organization should include the followings:

1. Abstract
2. Introduction
3. Literature Review (you can combine them with an introduction too)
4. Data and Methodology (can be two separate sections too)
5. Result and Discussion (you can divide them into multiple sections or subsections based on the type of result you are reporting)
6. Conclusion
7. References
8. Appendix (if any)

In addition to the final paper you are also required to upload your codes to your GITHUB page and submit the link.

Writing Instructions:

All of the writing you submit, i.e., proposal, progress report, and final paper, should follow American Psychological Association (APA) style and grammar guidelines. You can follow this link to get detailed instructions on the APA style. You can refer to a sample paper Here. All resources should be properly cited both in-text and in the reference list. Please follow APA referencing guidelines.

Research Ideas:

Below are several potential project ideas for your consideration (you are free to work on your own projects not contained on this list as well).

1. Analyze the network structure of financial assets.
2. Exchange-traded Funds (ETF, their performance, and network effect)
3. Classifying Financial Time Series: What features of financial return time series can be used to classify them into their correct asset class?
4. FINTECH and their consumer complaints: Are FinTech companies better equipped to deal with consumer complaints? You can get data consumer complaint data from here: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/consumer-complaints/
5. Lending Club