1. About 20 pages total not including cover page. The cover page requires title, date, names of each team member, course, followed by MSF GWU. No fancy pictures or other art.
2. Next page is an Abstract. 100 – 200 words. This simply describes the work that you do and your findings. For example, if I am working on GARCH, I would mention that “This work explores Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic (GARCH) models and the prediction of out-of-sample realized volatility for several financial time series. … Our findings include that for equity indexes, GARCH models that take account of the leverage effect are generally better predictors than those that do not. …”
3. Introduction – about 2 pages.
4. Literature review – about 4 pages.
5. Methodology – about 5 pages.
6. Results – about 7 pages.
7. Conclusions – 1 page.
8. References – 1 page.
For equations you must use Equation Editor and number the equations. All tables and figures should be neat and well formatted. You use numbering such as Table 1., Table 2., Figure 1., Figure 2. You should have a title for a table or figure – example Table 1. Mean Squared Errors for Respective GARCH Models.
In your text you cite the references. For example, “The seminal work of Black and Scholes (1973) resulted in analytical formulae that are used to value European options.”
We will discuss in the next class. All papers are due April 17th. This gets rid of the 10th versus 17th presentation issue.
YOU CAN DO IT. Pick a topic. Form a team. Get some papers on the topic. Implement a model(s) and create tables and figures.