Assessing the impact of research capstone preparation in the economics curriculum

It is challenging for economics major programs to support an undergraduate research capstone where the goal is for all majors to complete a research project that creates new knowledge. Our program has found a way to achieve this for all of our majors in the face of resource constraints and varying student skill levels, and has done this without requiring econometrics or a research methods class or sacrificing quality. Our method includes having assignments that require students to use peer-reviewed economics journal articles in most upper-level economic elective courses. We describe our method and "capstone prep" assignment variants, and, using regression analysis on a data set of undergraduate economics majors from 2007 through 2018, find that particular assignments appear to significantly improve capstone outcomes.