brycewang-stanford Research Ideation
Generate 3-5 research questions ordered from descriptive to causal.
Steps
Understand context: Read CLAUDE.md and any relevant project files.
Generate 3-5 research questions ordered by type:
- Descriptive: What are the stylized facts?
- Correlational: What patterns exist in the data?
- Causal: What is the effect of X on Y?
- Mechanism: Through what channel does X affect Y?
- Policy: What are the policy implications?
For each question, develop:
- Testable hypothesis with expected sign/magnitude
- Identification strategy (DiD, IV, RDD, synthetic control, matching, etc.)
- Data requirements with availability assessment
- Key assumptions and their plausibility
- Potential pitfalls and how to address them
- 2-3 related papers
Rank questions by feasibility and contribution in a summary table.
Save output to
quality_reports/research_ideation_[sanitized_topic].md.
Principles
- Be creative but grounded in what's feasible
- Think like a referee: what would make this convincing?
- Consider data availability realistically
- Suggest specific datasets (FRED, Census, PSID, BLS, central bank data, etc.)