Explain why does late night consumption of pizza and ice cream hurt your GPA?

Recall back to what was said in class about the way the field of Applied Microeconomics attempts to use the scientific method in analyzing human behavior, social interaction, and their societal consequences. Your assignment will be to create a model to study the effect of one behavior on another (e.g. the effect of eating pizza and ice cream after 1am on a student’s GPA, or the effect of “earmarked” federal funds on state education spending).

You should treat this assignment as if you were an academic trying to submit your research to a peer-reviewed (meaning other researchers read and critique it the whole way through) publication, which is the most important part of an academic’s job (arguably) and which separates a successful academic from an unsuccessful academic.

The assignment will consist of 2 parts: a paper worth 15 points and a presentation worth 7.

The paper should contain the following:

TOTAL: 27 points

• Introduction (5 points)
This section “motivates” the paper. Why do we care about this? Why should important people spend their important time critiquing your research on this topic. If it’s a topic that’s like the ice cream and pizza at 2am topic I gave above, that’s ok, just motivate it from your point of view. But you have to convince me it’s important.

• Background (5 points)
Someone has probably published on your topic before. If not, has someone studied one of the things, e.g. for the pizza and ice cream example, has anyone studied things affected by late night consumption of pizza and ice cream OR has anyone studied things that affect GPA?

Where does the literature, as a whole, point? Are pizza and ice cream bad for your GPA in 5 different papers? Are the findings mixed? If they’re mixed, what did the researchers do differently to achieve these different results?

• Model (5 points)
Why does late night consumption of pizza and ice cream hurt your GPA? Is it because in the morning, your stomach really hurts and you can’t focus in your finance class at 8am? Is it because the saturated fats in the pizza and ice cream build up as plaque (sp?) in your arteries and you develop increased blood pressure, which for some reason makes it harder for you to concentrate?

Whatever your topic, there needs to be an argument about how one thing affects the other.

• Data (4 points)
You need to be able to find data that allow you to answer your question. You don’t need to download and analyze the data, just describe them and how their variables allow you to provide empirical evidence for your proposed model.

EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNTIES (to be done in addition to what’s listed above)

These are options are a bit more involved, so you’ll probably want to go over your idea and action plan with me one-on-one before you start on one of these.

• Empirical Analysis (Maximum +10 EC)
Instead of just finding the data and calling it a day, analyze the data using regression analysis. This can be done in excel (Options : Add-Ins : Analysis Toolpack) or in statistical analysis programs like Stata or SAS, which can be found on certain computers on campus.

• Original Data Collection (Maximum +10 EC)
Create a survey online or on paper, get as many of your friends and acquaintances as possible to take it, and use this as your data to analyze.

• Natural Experiment (Maximum +20 EC)
Most people will be attempting what we call “cross-sectional correlational” research, where we simply look at the correlation (but not causation) between pizza and ice cream, and a person’s grades, for example. But there might be some third factor outside of our analysis that is the real driver, for instance maybe in general people that eat a lot of pizza and ice cream late at night also don’t care about their grades, because their parents are going to get them a job when they graduate. So the real driver of this person’s grades is the fact that they don’t care as much because their incentives are not aligned to perform to the best of their abilities, but we’re mistakenly attributing this to their pizza and ice cream habit.

To attempt to find a causal link, we would want to look for something outside of the model that could conceivably affect pizza and ice cream consumption but not the other personal attributes tied up in that consumption pattern.

Here’s an example: let’s say there’s only one place a student can buy pizza and ice cream after midnight, and that during the period of analysis, this place changes it’s hours so that now it closes at 11am. What we would do is compare observations from the period before the store changed its hours with the period after, and see how that affects people’s grades. This gets at causality better, because this store’s hours don’t fundamentally affect the way people think or behave, only the way they consume pizza and ice cream late at night.

Most of the time in Applied Microeconomics, we use a law that affects our treatment variable to find one of these “natural experiments,” but there are other methods, too. But they are (quite) probably too complex for the purposes of this class.


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