LAHORE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

ECONOMETRICS I (ECO 204)

PROBLEM SET I
Due Date: Monday 9th May2016. At H3 Room 33
1. Let kids denote the number of children ever born to a woman, and let educ denote years of
education for the woman. A simple model relating fertility to years of education is:

where u is the unobserved error.

(i) What kinds of factors are contained in u? Are these likely to be correlated with level of
education?
(ii) Will a simple regression analysis uncover the ceteris paribus effect of education on
fertility? Explain.
2.
The following table contains the ACT scores and the GPA (grade point average) for 8
college students. Grade point average is based on a four-point scale and has been rounded
to one digit after the decimal.

(i)

Estimate the relationship between GPA and ACT using OLS; that is, obtain the
intercept and slope estimates in the equation

Comment on the direction of the relationship. Does the intercept have a useful interpretation
here? Explain. How much higher is the GPA predicted to be, if the ACT score is increased by
5 points?
(ii) Compute the fitted values and residuals for each observation and verify that the
residuals (approximately) sum to zero.

(iii) What is the predicted value of GPA when ACT = 20?

(iv) How much of the variation in GPA for these 8 students is explained by ACT? Explain.
3. The data set BWGHT.RAW contains data on births to women in the United States. Two
variables of interest are the dependent variable, infant birth weight in ounces (bwght), and
an explanatory variable, average number of cigarettes the mother smoked per day during
pregnancy (cigs). The following simple regression was estimated using
data on n = 1388 births:

(i) What is the predicted birth weight when cigs = 0? What about when cigs =20 (one pack
per day)? Comment on the difference.
(ii) Does this simple regression necessarily capture a causal relationship between the childs
birth weight and the mothers smoking habits? Explain.
4. In the linear consumption function:

the (estimated) marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of income is simply the
slope, while the average propensity to consume (APC) is
Using observations for 100 families on annual income and consumption (both measured
in dollars), the following equation is obtained:

(i) Interpret the intercept in this equation and comment on its sign and magnitude.
(ii) What is predicted consumption when family income is $30,000?
(iii) With inc on the x-axis, draw a graph of the estimated MPC and APC.
5. Using data from 1988 for houses sold in Andover, MA, from Kiel and McClain (1995), the
following equation relates housing price (price) to the distance from a recently built garbage
incinerator (dist):

(i) Interpret the coefficient on log(dist). Is the sign of this estimate what you expect it to be?
(ii) Do you think simple regression provides an unbiased estimator of the ceteris paribus
elasticity of price with respect to dist? (Think about the citys decision on where to put the
incinerator.)
(iii) What other factors about a house affect its price? Might these be correlated with
distance from the incinerator?