| As an undergraduate you will never publish a paper in a respectable journal because nothing you do will be of consequence. I don't mean to sound like a dick, but I absolutely want to dash that dream for you now so you don't waste time on it--because a bad paper in a second-rate journal is worse than no research at all, and will hurt you badly even if you don't submit it assuming it's found.
If you're talking about a term paper, or whatever else the case may be, of course you're going to submit that to graduate programs. You'll submit your best paper or two most likely as part of a portfolio of work. That comes back to doing well in regular undergraduate econ classes, though. I doubt whatever you're writing in your first year will be any good, though. 10 pages long is nothing, plenty of very intelligent people have dedicated time to studying welfare and we are not a welfare state (unless you're going to look at certain European countries which have oil revenues that make a welfare state viable, and as a society they appear to have decided that the moral implications of not having a welfare state trump faults, making your analysis irrelevant and purely academic), so I'm not sure where you'd be going with that paper anyway. |