MAN 6930 Human Capital Analysis

Project Proposal Due 11:59pm Saturday April 6 Submission at CANVAS (elearning.ufl.edu)

Project Report Due 11:59pmWednesday April 24 Submission at CANVAS (elearning.ufl.edu)

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Instructions In this project, you have the opportunity to study a question (or a set of questions) of your interest related to human capital analysis. There is no restriction onwhat data to use, what statistical software to run, or what statistical tests youmay use to answer the question. There are only three requirements/guidelines:

– The question you propose to study needs to be interesting and meaningful in practice, meaning that 1) there is no obvious answer to the question without any data analysis, and 2) answering the question could enhance the practice of human capital management. It also needs to be related to at least one of the topics covered in the course (e.g., diversity, engagement, turnover, performance, recruitment, etc.).

– To answer the question, you need to tap intomore than one dataset. There are various ways to do so. You could join two datasets together according to a common identifier variable. You could also use different datasets to study different aspects of the problem (e.g., each dataset for a different industry). For example, if you are interested in studying how job experience affects job performance, you could tap into one dataset, “Chapter 6 Individual Turnover”, to analyze the relationship between “AppraisalRating” and “LengthOfService”, and another dataset, say “Chapter 7 with performance 2014 2015 and Sick2014”, for a more comprehensive view that includes not only job tenure and performance rating but also other variables such as job strain.

– Since our course focuses on analytical methods, your answer to the question should include not only conceptual arguments but also statistical evidence. In general, I would expect at least five statistical tests/procedures in your analysis. These could be different procedures or variations of the same procedure. For example, when studying job tenure, you could treat it as a numerical variable and run linear regression with job tenure being an independent variable. You could also treat it as a categorical variable and run another linear regression after dummy coding (like we do inWeek 5 to address the non-linear effect of age).

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Project Proposal I understand that, for a free-style project like this one, it could be difficult to gaugewhether what you plan to do is of the right scope, or if it is too ambitious or too narrow. The project proposal is an opportunity for us to

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work together and pinpoint the right scope of your project. In the proposal, please specify

– the question you plan to study in the project, – why you think the question is interesting andmeaningful (as

defined earlier in the instructions), – a list of datasets you plan to tap into (it is perfectly fine to use

only the data available from the textbook), – a list of statistical tests/procedures you plan to run over the data.

Please note that you can feel free tomake changes to your plan once you start the data analysis. The project proposal is not meant to be a binding contract. Its purpose is for me to give you early feedback if there is any serious issue with your proposed plan.

Please submit your project proposal as a PDF file. In general, a 2-page single-space document should be sufficient for the project proposal.

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Project Report There is no need to repeat what is already included in the project proposal. Instead, the project report should clearly state any findings and takeawaymessages you get from data analysis. The report should also include

– any changes to your proposed plan – for each statistical test/procedure, please include

– how this analysis addresses the questions of interest, – your findings from the analysis, and – any statistical evidence (e.g., t-statistic, p-value,

estimates and standard errors for regression coefficients) supporting your findings.

Like in the homework assignments, There is no need to include the steps/script/code you ran on any statistical software or any screenshot of the software outputs.

Please submit your project report as a PDF file. In general, a 3-5 page single-space document should be sufficient for the project report.

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