Reed College
Reed College

Economics 312

Spring 2011
Econometric Project #7

In-Class Debate on Wednesday, April 20

Sex discrimination in wages

Do women earn less than men in the United States when other relevant determinants of wages have been taken into account? This has been the subject of a huge literature. (For a dated methodological survey, read Chapter 5 of Ernst Berndt's The Practice of Econometrics, which is on reserve.) The usual dataset that has been used to test this question is the Current Population Survey, conducted monthly by the Bureau of the Census. Two teams of two students are assigned to this topic:

  • Team A: Mark Hintz and Lillian Karabaic
  • Team B: Lauren Bloomquist and Alden Jones

Value of higher education

How much does attending college increase one's wages? Like sex discrimination, this question has been much debated and is often tested using Current Population Survey data. Two teams of three students are assigned to this topic:

  • Team A: Carl Hedman, Michael Kincaid, and Ben Sutphin
  • Team B: Gabriel Forsythe-Korzeneiwicz, Jeremy Laughton, and Su Liu

Which team will argue which side of each of these questions will be determined by a coin toss in class on Monday, April 18.

Available datasets

Econometrics textbooks provide numerous sample datasets that could be used to test these hypotheses. You may use any or all of these that you find helpful to your case, or use other datasets that you find. However, if you use any additional datasets, you must make these available to your rival group no later than classtime on Monday. You should note that the datasets below have been extracted from a diverse set of studies, many of which were looking at questions quite different from those you are exploring. You are responsible for determining whether the sample observations and variables present in the datasets are appropriate for your analysis. Even though there is not a lot of information given in the source documents, you can infer some information about the data from inspection. For example, if there is a wife age and a husband age for every observation, the sample must consist only of married couples.

  • From Ernst Berndt's The Practice of Econometrics (sources and variables are documented in Chapter 5)
  • From Wooldridge's Introductory Econometrics, 2nd ed.
    • CARD.dta
      Data set is taken from paper on returns to education: David Card (1995), "Using Geographic Variation in College Proximity to Estimate the Return to Schooling," in Aspects of Labour Market Behavior: Essays in Honour of John Vanderkamp,  ed. by L.N. Christophides, E.K. Grant, and R. Swidinsky, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 201-222.  This book is not in the Reed Library. I've ordered it through Summit and will make an electronic copy of the final paper available to you when I can. The link above takes you to the NBER Working Paper version, which is probably quite close to the final version.
  • From Hill, Griffiths, and Judge, 4th ed.
    • CPS4.dta  Description
      This is the full version of the CPS4small dataset that you have used in projects. In the text, HGL say that it is from 2008. Their data description file is less than completely informative.
    • CPS.dta  Description
      I believe that this dataset is a leftover from an earlier edition of the text. The third edition discusses a cps.dta dataset that is from the 1997 CPS; I think that this is it.
  • From Stock and Watson's Introduction to Econometrics, 2nd ed.
    • CPS04.dta  Description
      The Stock and Watson description file describes this as "for 2004 (from the March 2005 survey)." There are only a few variables in this dataset.
    • CPS92_04.dta  Description
      This dataset appears to combine the CPS04 dataset with additional observations from 1992, but for the same limited number of variables.

Format of debate

Each side will have 8 minutes to make an initial presentation of evidence in favor of their position, then 4 minutes to respond after their opponent's presentation. Time limits must be rigidly enforced in order to complete both debates within a 50-minute class session. You may use the classroom projector for your presentations, but you must have your materials loaded and ready to go before noon or the time required will be subtracted from your 8 minutes. I have reserved L203 from 9:00 to 10:00am that morning for you to go in and load your presentations onto the classroom computer. (There are classes in there from 10-12, so don't go in the room then.)

A written summary of your analysis and results should be submitted to the instructor on the day of the debate. This need not be elaborately literate, but should include the relevant tables, Stata results, and a copy of your presentation materials.