Basically, indicate what the topic is. Any well defined financial or economic topic is fine but the key word here is “well defined”, it cannot be vague. E.g. you may want to estimate an augmented CAPM model for Delta Airlines stock returns, indicating what potential ideas, hypotheses to test (e.g., whether oil price changes explain the stock returns after controlling for relevant variables (market returns, industry returns, GDP growth rate, etc). You need to define a period of study in the case of time series (e.g. the last 2 years with daily or weekly data; or the last 5 years with monthly data, etc) or the sample of units if the study were to be cross-sectional (e.g. the S&P500 stocks during 2019, etc). Remember the final project is NOT a thesis; it doesn’t have to be complicated or sophisticated, just well-defined, well discussed and well done. And the two-pager is the first installment of that project.
In your proposal/intro you should explain BRIEFLY why it makes economic sense to include such variables. In the final version of the paper you’d write this AND also cite a few papers -some literature- that have used your variables or similar variables (if such references exist). This time you may cite a textbook (e.g., to reference the CAPM or Fama-French, etc) or a paper (if you had reviewed one and would like to more or less replicate that article) and that will be enough. For now a good explanation without citations is fine, but citations if you have them will make your proposal stronger.
You only need to give a brief idea of what effects you expect to find (e.g., that oil prices are an important determinant of delta stock returns after using some control variables) in this 2-pager.
