If you have chosen the non-entrepreneurial grading scheme, ten percent of your grade for this course will come from an extended project.

Project Suggestions

The purpose of these projects is to allow you to go more deeply into a question than is possible in an assignment or exam. Projects may be done individually or in pairs. The due date for all projects is the same as the date of the final exam. The deliverable for a project will usually take the form of an extended report or essay.

A partial list of projects follows. You are encouraged to propose additional and alternative projects.

  1. Life Insurance: Get details of the life insurance policies offered by several companies. Make explicit what it is you're looking for in a life insurance policy, and compare the different terms offered, using the techniques covered in class.

  2. Mortgages: What institutions offer mortgages? Find out what mortgage rates you can get from several different sources, and compare their advantages and disadvantages.

  3. The stock market: select an investment portfolio of publically traded stocks, and track their performance over several months. Explain how you read the stock listings in the paper. What performance are you looking for in a stock, and what criteria could you use to predict this performance?

  4. Car Loans: car dealers often offer attractive financing packages. Get quotes for several such packages, compare them with rates available from other lending institutions, and calculate what reduction in the selling price of the car they correspond to.

  5. Select one or more books from the following list, read them, and write a critical review.
    • ``The Economic Theory of Railway Location", A.M. Wellington, John Wiley, New York, 1887.
    • ``The Affluent Society", J.K. Galbraith, Pelican books.
    • ``The New Industrial State", J.K. Galbraith, Pelican books.
    • ``The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1880
    • ``Capital", Karl Marx.
    • ``Free to Choose", Milton Friedman.
    • ``Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered,'' E.F. Schumacher, Harper and Row, New York, 1975.

  6. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Koran all condemn lending money at interest as the sin of usury. Some banks in Islamic nations have attempted to function without interest charges. Report what you can find out about the theory and practice of interest-free economics.

  7. What would it cost you to borrow a million dollars for a year? (If you attempt this project, you should obtain at least one written quotation from a lending institution, though it is not actually necessary to produce the money in class. If you or your immediate family already has a million dollars, you can attempt the same question for a billion dollars.)