Homework #15

Due Thursday May 3, 2012

Econ 20150

Kevin R Foster, CCNY

For this exercise your project group may hand in a single assignment. When submitting assignments, please include your name and the assignment number as part of the filename. Please write the names of your project group members at the beginning of your homework. These assignments may be made public and available to all members of the class.

1. Use the dataset of the CPS, CPS_hw15 (on InYourClass and Bb), which has wage and salary data as well as basic demographic information. Compare some linear regressions with "Wage and Salary" as the dependent variable, for different choices of independent variables. Concentrate particularly on the question of what is the wage impact of getting a four-year college degree? What other variables should be in this regression? Which are statistically significant? Carefully explain the hypothesis tests. What subset of the data would you concentrate on - fulltime workers, part-time, both FT &PT, non-workers? What do you learn from this regression? What important variables are not in the data set? Discuss.

2. Find another paper from EconLit that is related to the topic of your final project. Write a summary of the paper; summary should be 500-1000 words (1 or 2 pages). Explain what data set is used (is it publicly available?), what hypothesis tests are made, and what statistical tests are completed. If you had the data on SPSS, what tests could you run? Explain.