EF5473 Recommendations for the Individual Reports

KC Lim

September 2023

Recommendations:

1. Please submit in Word (not in pdf) so that it is easier to read certain figures, graphs, etc.

2. Please organize your reports in an appropriate way. There is no single format, but generally,

there is an Introduction, Analysis (eg., Analysis of company, industry, etc, trend),

Recommendations, Recommendations for future Research (if any), Conclusions.

3. State your objectives in Introduction.

4. Feel free to include sub-sections under Analysis to describe for example: The Real Assets in

ESG – Examples; The Benefits of (something); The Revolt against ESG; Examples of ESG

Funds; Are returns from ESG lower?; anti-ESG funds; The amount of spending to meet

carbon neutrality requirements in China; The Trend, etc.

5. Feel free to describe the other side of the coin, e.g, anti-ESG funds.

6. Cases of companies, industries or countries are fine if you can tell a good story. Illustrate

with your own examples, analogies (e.g., USA and China are the world’s top two

supertankers in the world economy), if available.

7. It is not necessary to present mathematical proofs for this report. You are encouraged

to use data and figures from published sources to support your views and you are not

required to present new data. However, you are welcome to do so if you wish to.

Performing regressions or econometric analysis is not required, but feel free to do so if

you like.

8. Consider using Grammarly (a free software) to check your grammar and sentence structure

before you submit.

9. Include your own thoughts and your analysis as much as possible. Please include any

recommendations, or recommendations for future research, if any.

10. A Conclusion section is necessary.

Past advice given to students:

i. Summarize very briefly the speaker's lecture contents. You do not have to describe the

speaker's seminar in full. Rather, in your future reports, put in your own views and your

own analysis.

ii. When describing ESG, you do not have to define in full in several pages what ESG is all

about as the definitions of ESG are already established.

iii. Include a References section

iv. Structure the sentences well.

v. If you plan on doing regression, the number of observations should be at least 30. 10 or

12 observations in the dataset should not be used for regressions. Data description must

be provided.

vi. Use the right terms – some terms were translated directly from Mandarin and the

English equivalent does not seem right.

vii. Recommendations should come before Conclusions.

viii. The Conclusion sections of some reports are too long compared to the overall word

count of the reports for this course. Long articles can have a long Conclusion section as

in certain economics and finance journal articles. But this is a short report.

ix. New content with new citations of references should not be introduced in the

Conclusion section. New content should be moved to the Analysis part.

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x. The paragraphs in your report cannot be too long. Paragraphs that are ¾ page long are

too long.

xi. Describing the current situation is important but do put in more of your own analysis.

Description of the current state of affairs should not occupy a large portion of your

report.

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