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Cost-Benefit Analysis Paper - AEC 434 Purpose & Recall The purpose of deliverable 4 is to write the paper

Economics

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An 8-10 page doubled spaced memo (2000-2500 words) for a policymaker who is not an economist or benefit-cost expert, but needs to make a decision about whether or not the policy/program that you are analyzing should be pursued. Sources are *not* included in the word count. 

This draft should include all the parts of the final paper. You may also include questions on which you’d like guidance from the professor; when you do so please highlight your questions so they are easy to detect and tell apart from your writing. While this is not graded, it is a requirement for the course and must be turned in on time. The purpose is to help you stay on track and get feedback to create a better final paper and presentation. Elements that should be included in this draft are:

• An introduction relating the case at hand and the topic you chose. It will be the background for the case and frame the objective of the paper.
• A thoughtful analysis of the benefits, costs and conclusions that you draw from your work. Try to avoid economic jargon, but make sure that you explain to the reader enough of your assumptions and framework to make them believe that you are rigorous.
• A complete table including numbers for each benefit and cost that you are including in your study. The table should indicate how many years you are using and your chosen discount rate. You should also include somewhere a total discounted net benefit that will help you make your recommendation about whether or not to pursue this policy or project.

A reference list. Use Chicago Style, author-date citations. Do NOT include references reviewed but not specifically cited in the proposal content.

Remember: at the end of this project, you will need to have described how this policy works, figured out who gains and loses in society, what the scope of these gains and losses are, and how big they might be. At a minimum, your outline should include a benefits section and a costs section. You should also think about the scope of your analysis (just the project you read about, or the whole country, or more than one country?). In your final project, you will also need to state assumptions about the time frame over which you are conducting measurement, what kind of discount rate you might choose, and why. You don’t have to have measured every single component of the benefits and costs, but you will have to discuss what they are, and, to the extent possible, quantified them. Therefore, you need to be thinking about constructing a table for your final project that has a benefits column and a costs column. Your final project will need this table to be filled in with numbers. Now is a good time to start figuring out where those numbers might come from