8065	Assessment
Abstract	No abstract.
Research Question	The area of interest in clear, but the actual research question is not.  Indeed, it is difficult to understand the stated principal hypothesis.  Neither of the implied predictions seem reasonable on the surface.  The first is that the rate of foreclosure will have a positive relationship with a group of "independent" variables that include the number of flood insurance policies, the number of claims, etc.  Since the "independent" variables vary by the population size of the county (or floodplain) but the rate of foreclosure does not, we would commonly expect no relationship.  With respect to the quality of levees, the other "dependent" variable, we would probably expect no relationship with some "independent" variables and a negative relationship with others (such as number of floods and claims).  In short, the hypotheses might be plausible, but without further explanation they do not appear sensible.  The principal hypotheses need to be spelled out much more clearly.  Readers should be able to understand what motivates and justifies a hypothesis even if they aren’t familiar with the NFIP program or flood insurance more generally.
Literature Review	The information in the introduction, background, and literature review sections is all a bit jumbled and doesn’t flow logically.   This makes great demands on the reader to impose a logic (and under such conditions, readers commonly impose their own logic, not the one the author hoped for). A good literature review must be careful to represent the reviewed works accurately.  Some weaknesses appear here.  For example, the point of the Fell & Kousky 2015 article would appear to be that if people see flood protection as effective, being in a flood plain does not reduce the value of commercial properties; but absent such protection it does.  The summary in the literature review does not convey this.  Similarly, the review discussion of Zhang (2016) suggests it is responding to the Fell & Kousky (2015) research design, but Zhang never refers to these authors.  This is not surprising, as Zhang is aiming at a quite different research question, the relative impact of flood risk on the prices of different parts of the residential housing market.  The review also seems to misinterpret the aim of the quantile regression, in Zhang.  It is still a hedonic model, with the goal not being so much to improve controls for unobservables (indeed, the Coarsened Exact Matching of Fell & Kousky might be considered better by some; in Zhang, this is addressed, if by anything, by the use of the difference in differences technique), but to distinguish effects at different parts of the distribution.  The main point here is that a literature review must be accurate. The moment that reviewers perceive the author of a proposal does not accurately portray some aspect of the existing literature, is a moment when the proposal loses credibility.
Data	The section on data strikes an ambitious tone, but manages to be too obscure to assess effectively.  It implies that a lot of good data will just fold together and make for a good analysis.  This would be a good outcome, but things are rarely so easy. Lets look at some specifics.  The data section fails to ever say that the NYU data being discussed is the RealityTrac data.  It refers to Gallagher (2014) as the source of further data, but neglects to include the reference in the bibliography ("Learning About an Infrequent Event: Evidence from Flood Insurance Take-Up ...").  The assertion that three data sets will be merged provides no hint at what level or by what unit they will be merged and ignores that the Gallagher data and the RealityTrac data are for different periods that only overlap for two years.  The proposal states that the unit of analysis will be the county, but does not discuss how the source data sets will be converted to county level.  Nor does it consider the analytic implications of using summary data (presumably means, rates, and the like).  For example, the listed predictor variables that are raw counts ("number of ...") would not under any standard analyses be applied against the proposed outcome variable "Home Foreclosure Rate").  And it is difficult to guess how the quality of levees became a dependent variable given the rest of the proposal (and ignoring that the boundaries of levees may not correspond to other distinctions), in which they only seem to make sense as an independent variable.
Causal Interpretations	The current draft contains little in terms of causal discussion, and what it does, in terms of the guiding hypotheses, is difficult to understand.  It could help considerably if the proposal included a basic model linking the independent variables to dependent variables, and discussed the causal mechanisms assumed to produce the pattern of causal linkages.  This would potentially help to clarify the development of other parts of the proposal and it would help readers make sense of the research design.
Research Value	Aside from some vague comments at the end of the literature review, this is not addressed.
Timetable	Not included.
Citations & Biblio	The overall reference apparatus is fine, but incomplete.  At least one major citation in the literature review (Fell and Kousky, 2015) is absent from the bibliography, as is the data source, Gallagher (2014).  Citations and bibliographies should be complete with no errors.
Quality of writing	The prose is fine, but the logical progression is sometimes awkward and sometimes confusing.  The main points are often lost as readers wade through long, complex sentences.  Focus on brevity, clarity, and non-technical language.  Every section might be improved by asking "what is this supposed to convey?", then trying to outline what is there to see how well it responds to that question's answer.
Priorities for Revising for Final Draft	What stand out most here are probably the ambiguity surrounding the research question, the implicit causal models driving the research design, and how the proposed data will be transformed into a unified dataset that responds to the research question.
Miscellaneous Notes	The proposal suggests a great deal of background research and the background/literature review is very detailed. However, the actual research plan needs to be more concrete and detailed to show if it is viable.