The proposal is a preliminary work for your paper. It should be written as a paper (complying with all prerequisites of a paper.
The more time you spend on the proposal, the less time you would have to spend on putting the paper together.
For your convenience, below is its description from the syllabus.
One-page proposal should include preliminary model, brief justification for the model including one paragraph cursory summary of the existing literature to justify the model (justification is solely based on summarized literature and existing theory), expectations (signs and magnitudes of estimated coefficients), a sample of data (at least, a couple of observations in a table form) and preliminary bibliography. The entire proposal should be about a page and written with a narrative–not in a bullet form. You need to use three explanatory variables one of which being a control variable (altogether three independent variables and one dependent variable).
