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During this term, we will study the size of airports and changes in size over time. In the US, there are nearly 20,000 airports. These include public airports that serve commercial airlines as well as airports that are public but do not serve commercial airlines. There are also airports that are “heliports”, gliderports, and also some that are private airports. I have taken the top 100 airports in the U.S. measured by an estimated number of passengers. Each of you will be assigned an airport to study through the term. Your primary mission is to develop and estimate a model of airport size and changes in size using the techniques taught in 320 and 421. At the end of the last week of class, you will be asked to turn in a short paper on the topic for your specific airport. Throughout the term, you will be asked, as part of your homeworks, to report on your progress.
As many of you may know, I like what I call the process of econometrics, which essentially is the format of most empirical papers. That is, we will be looking for:
1. An introduction. This identifies what you are doing (a problem statement) and why. An introduction should consist of a problem statement, a why are you doing it i.e., who cares of the problem and why do they care (this can be academic but must have a non-academic explanation). As final paragraphs you might describe (briefly) what you do, and the central result of the paper, and then point to the structure of the rest of the paper.
2. Background: This identifies the setting of the problem. In the specific case, you might consider a description of the airport, when it was established, how large is it in land space, how many airlines serve it, what changes have taken place over time, who own and operates it, etc. This can be done by internet search (google), Nexus/Lexus search, reference librarians, airport websites, scholar.google.com, etc.1
3. Conceptual Model: This identifies your model of the process generating the data. It is theoretical and explains the size of the airport and changes through time e.g., there may be an event e.g., Saint Louis airport was once a major hub for TWA airlines. But, TWA failed (went bankrupt) and so now we have a beautiful airport with loads of services, but not much activity. You can do a scholar.google.com search for economics articles on firm size, airport size, growth, etc.
4. Empirical model: This section comes directly from the conceptual model. It identifies the key factors of airport size. It has a mathematical representation of the theory, identifies what is endogenous and exogenous, and some notion of the error terms (and possible violations of the classical regression model).
1 http://www.transtats.bts.gov/ and http://www.faa.gov/ are two obvious websites that make sense to look at for data, extra information etc. Please see a reference librarian for help in seeking out information from the press and other sources. These must be cited.
5. Data section: This section identifies the sources of data, the dependent variable and each of the explanatory variables (how where they defined, how are they measured). You should also present descriptive statistics i.e., how do the data behave in terms of the problem statement. In this case, you could present a graph of the number of passengers over time, and identify from items 2 and 3, major events and/or specific issues.
6. Empirical results contains the model estimates and specification tests. If you use purely observations over time e.g., number of passengers over time, you probably should test for stationarity and/or autocorrelation in the error structure. If you use panel data, you might look for differences in the variance across airports and whether the parameters are the same.
7. Summary and Conclusions: Summarize your work and answer the question posed.
8. References: All references must be identified. Your paper should be about 7-10 pages (excluding tables and figures).
To facilitate your work, I will place on blackboard, the top 100 airports originations by airport on a quarterly basis from quarter 1, 1993 (hw1.dta). The data are available in “raw” from http://www.transtats.bts.gov/Fields.asp?Table_ID=247. I do note that you need a “monster” machine to use the data in raw form in that there are about 3 to 4.5 million observations per quarter, but you can also update access data for only the airport that you have. I have downloaded these data by quarter, consolidated and calculated the total number of passengers by origin airport and truncated the data after N=100. Through the term, we will also add information on local populations and income data gleaned from
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