Assessment Brief
This term paper is conceived to facilitate your preparation for selecting a dissertation topic by giving you experience with selecting and writing a case study. The difference is that this assignment should be done without primary research, using secondary material (including research articles written by others) or material in the public domain such as reports by the National Audit Office. Your assignment is to select a case study (i.e., an infrastructure project) that can be used to illustrate the material learned in this module, especially:
- Agency Theory, including but not limited to principal-agent problems
- Transaction Cost Economics, including both internal and external transaction costs
- Contract Theory, including but not limited to hold-up problems associated with incomplete contracts and misalignment of incentives
- Disaster footprint analysis, including but not limited to clear costs of project failures
- Environmental and Climate Change economics, including but not limited to ways of adapting to and mitigate climate risk
- Islamic Finance, including but not limited to Sharia-compliant investment management
You are not constrained to the United Kingdom for examples and are welcome to choose from any country and/or legal regime as these issues invariably arise in all contexts.
Expectations:
- Nice Story, high quality academic paper with analysis backed up by literature.
- Case study is not a compulsory, but can be used.
- Minimum number of references 20.
- Methodology Recommendations with Solutions
- Identify problem and explain the way forward and/or solution
- Analysis conclusion
Link to module learning outcomes
The term paper is used to assess students’ understanding of input-output tables. Students need to be able to apply knowledge learnt in this module to analyse real world examples.
Format structure
The assessment is a 3000-word limit paper, which needs to include the following parts.
- Introduction explaining the problem.
- Description of the case you choose.
- Identify the issue occurred in the case.
- Extended discussion.
- Conclusions.
- References.
Marking Criteria
| Description of the chosen case | 20% | You should present the project selected, identifying the main players and the challenges faced. |
| Issue arose | 30% | You should succinctly summarize the issues you have identified (agency theory, contract theory, transaction costs, negative environmental or social externalities, etc.) that are relevant to the case. |
| Discussion | 30% | you will apply these concepts to the case in an extended discussion, in which you first evaluate the actions taken by key players to mitigate (successfully or unsuccessfully depending on the case) the problems and challenges you have identified and then offer recommendations based on material learned in the module. |
| Conclusions | 10% | Your conclusions should relate back to the case. Do NOT simply reiterate your recommendations which have been shown in the previous section. Provide a few discussion questions to show how the chose project illustrate the concepts taught in the module and critical thinking. |
| Presentation | 10% | Coherent and well structured. Define all abbreviations when they appear first. Use Harvard referencing in your essay. There are two stages involved in using Harvard referencing: in-text citations and the reference list. |
