Education and Economics Development

EDUCATION AND ECONOMICS DEVELOPMENT
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(10 points) Multiple choice questions
1 You cannot apply a regression discontinuity method if
1 The discontinuity in the running variable (say test scores, etc.) at the cutoff is fuzzy instead of being strict
2 You do not know the exact location of the cutoff
3 Other covariates (say gender, race, poverty, etc.) are discontinuous at the cutoff.
4 Any of the above
2 The main reasons why Muralidharan and Sundaraman (Aggregate Effect of School Choice) conduct a 2-stage experiment (randomization among villages followed by randomization at the student level) are to
5 Ensure that the RCT involve as many students as possible
6 Get the most significant possible treatment group in terms of number of students, and increase the statistical power
7 Avoid the problem of a contaminated control group and estimate spillover effects
8 Serve as a template for national-level implementation
3 To conduct a falsification test, Barrera-Osorio and Raju (Evaluating the impact of public student subsidies)
9 use raw student test score data to calculate their own school SLQAT pass rates
10 estimate RD impact estimates at two arbitrarily-selected false cutoffs: 57 per cent and 77 per cent
create two alternative bandwidths around the optimal bandwidth, at 75 per cent and 125 per cent of the optimal bandwidth
administer a field survey to schools with SLQAT pass rates between +/- 15 percentage points of the 67 percent cut-off
4 Which of the following are caveats that Kazianga et al. (The Effects of "Girl-Friendly" Schools) mention with respect to calculating the cost-effectiveness of the BRIGHT school construction program in Burkina Faso?
Many of the interventions included in the BRIGHT schools could have affected outcomes other than enrollment and test scores.
Though the authors have detailed cost information on the BRIGHT schools, their estimates of the cost of the government schools are more tentative.
They estimate the cost-effectiveness of having a BRIGHT school and then add to it the costs that would be incurred in having the unique BRIGHT amenities in a planned government school.
All of the above.
5 Which of the following is not true of meta-analysis?
It converts the results of all the included studies to a common metric – then estimates the average effect of different types of intervention
By pooling across multiple studies, it provides a stronger statistical power compared to what can be achieved by individual studies
It allows the researcher to control for the quality of studies
It allows the researcher to include all studies of high quality, regardless of the exact variables and data examined and reported
Short essay questions
(25 points) The Basics of Program Evaluation
1 (2 points) What is the problem of causal inference?
Casual inference tends to assume that the effect of treatment assignment is constant in all individuals being examined and, therefore, the impossibility of observing the causal impact on a single unit.
2 (2 points) What is selection bias?
Selection bias is when you don't randomly select ...