Applied Quantitative Methods (MPP-U2) Problem Set 4 Due May 11, 2012

1. (20) Suppose that you survey residents of Italy and Greece and ask them about whether they think austerity measures will help the European debt crisis. Of 1252 Italians, 245 say yes and the remainder, no. Of 976 Greeks, 365 say yes and the remainder, no. Carry out a test at the 0.05 level of the null hypothesis that in Italy one-quarter of all people think austerity measures will help the debt crisis. Make sure that you report your test statistic as well as your conclusion. You must justify correctly your conclusion to get full credit. Hint: use the command prtesti to do the calculations for this question. The i here stands for immediate. If you have never used prtesti, then read the help le for this command and try the examples that are given in the le. Now carry out a test at the 0.01 level that Italian and Greek residents have the same probability of thinking that austerity measures will help the debt crisis. As above, make sure that you report your test statistic as well as your conclusion. You must justify correctly your conclusion to get full credit. Hint: you can use prtesti here as well. 2. (10) Suppose that you work for a personal bureau for a city in Germany and that your supervisor asks you to determine whether people who are not promoted within the bureau tend to resign in the year following a non-promotion. You sample 76 individuals who were not promoted and nd that 35 resigned in the following year. You also sample 62 individuals who were promoted and nd that 13 resigned. Write a brief statement to your supervisor that responds to her query. You can assume that she is familiar with basic statistics and thus expects to see statistical language in your statement. 3. (50) Download the le gen08.csv from moodle and read it into Stata using insheet. This les contains a random selection of voter records from a Florida voting les from 2010. Most variables are self-explanatory. The variable general08 indicates when a voter voted, either early, absentee, or at the polls on election day. (a) (10) Use prtest to test at the 0.05 level the null hypothesis that the fraction of women in the data set is one-half. Use a two-sided alternative. What do you nd? Explain. (b) (10) Use ttest to test at the 0.05 level the null hypothesis that the average of all voters in the le is 30. Use a two-sided alternative. What do you nd? Explain.

(c) (10) Use ttest to test at the 0.01 level the null hypothesis that the average age of all male voters in the le is the same as the average age of female voters. Note: this is a two-sample test, and you should use a two-sided alternative. (d) (10) Make a table of race versus time of voting. Carry out a chi-squared test at the 0.05 level that race is independent of time of voting. What is your test statistic? Do you reject the null of independence? If so, explain what elements of race and time of voting appear to be notable. (e) (10) Now carry out a similar exercise but this time make a table of political party versus time of voting. Carry out a chi-squared test at the 0.05 level that party is independent of time of voting. What is your test statistic? Do you reject the null of independence? If not, explain what elements of party and time of voting appear to be notable. 4. (10) A professor at Humboldt University in Berlin believes that class participation is related to whether students pass statistics classes. Of 71 student who failed his recent statistics class, 56 had low participation and 15, high participation. Of the 285 who passed this class, 178 had low participation and 107, high participation. Write a short answer that evaluates the professors claim about a relationship between participation and passing. Note: your answer must carry out a chi-squared test. Another note: could you instead have carried out a two-sample proportions test? Yes, and your result would be identical to the result you get from a chi-squared test. 5. (10) Suppose that you are studying sick days among construction workers in Berlin. You nd that, among 172 sampled workers, the sample fraction of sick days per year is xn = 17 with s = 2.31. You carry out a test at the 0.05 level that the true number of sick days per work is 12. Use a two-tailed alternative. Do you reject or not? Now you discover that s is actually greater than 2.31 but you do not know how much greater. Could a large value of s change your conclusion about rejection? Why or why not? Explain carefully.