Prove My Friend Wrong: Come Up with Ideas for an Economic Study

[JaredL]

Discussions like this make me wish I did applied work and not theory. I have a couple half-baked ideas about education, with datasets in mind, but I have to work on other stuff until at least I go on the market next year.

Econophile is going to own this thread. This is now obvious from his posts, but was also pretty obvious just from reading the OP.

The problem with this discussion is that while people are posing good questions they are pretty much all going to fall into two categories:
1. Questions that have been answered but didn't make Freakonomics or other major media outlets.
2. Those that economists or others have also considered but for which there is no reasonable data set.

Data sets that answer causality are extremely hard to come up with. Generally you need some variance from sources outside the system otherwise you can't untangle the correlation.

For example, take MrMon's suggestion of looking at teacher pay and student success. The interesting question here would be something like "What is the effect of increasing/decreasing the salary of public school teachers on the success of students in their school?"

The problem here is that districts that pay more money tend to contain people that are wealthy. People who are wealthy tend to be well educated. Wealthy and well educated parents tend to have children that are more successful in schools. So the problem here is that there are factors, parents' wealth and education, that are actually driving both the pay and success of students. Unless you can find a dataset that does not have this problem you can't answer the question. This sometimes but not often the case.

I don't do empirical stuff so I'll be less biased than others but I agree with OP's friend. I find it unlikely that the questions people will bring up here have not been thought up by researchers. The real key to these things is finding the right model and data that answer the question well. That is hard.

[MrMon]

This is why as I wrote my idea, I started narrowing it to eliminate the problem of different student socioeconomic backgrounds. If you could take just urban districts that tend to be pretty uniform and compare pay to student success, something might turn up. For instance, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Washington, and Philadelphia would all be pretty similar, mostly black, no real affluent neighborhoods attending, or too few to make a difference. You really can't include NYC, too many other kids in the district. LA and most of the west is too Hispanic. Find as many similar districts as you can, then compare them on teacher pay. Do something similar with sururban or rural districts as well, try to find clone districts, then compare on teacher pay. With the thousands of districts out there, surely it should be possible to find enough that are similar to come up with something that is statisically signifigant.

[tsearcher]

Just because the question has been asked and answered doesn't mean it can't be asked again and looked at in a different way.

I think there would be a couple of ways to find correlations for the education example you provided. First you could just compare school districts with similar household incomes and education levels, but different salaries for the teachers. Additionally, you could compare individual schools with themselves. That is, often a bond won't pass and schools have to make budget cuts. Then a year or two later the bond passes and the money is there again. So you could compare test scores before and after.

[MrMon]

If one wanted to be controversial, you could compare schools where everything is identical except for the ethnic makeup. Since I'm switching to teaching after careeers elsewhere, I get to read tons of bogus theories on why students succeed or fail. Most of the theories start out to the left of Karl Marx, so they're pretty worthless, even if trendy. But if I had to pick one factor that determines success over all else, it would be culture. Some kids come from a culture that demands educational success and some don't, those that do do better than those that don't have the emphasis, regardless of income, teacher pay, resources, etc. I'd love to see a study that could back that up.

[En Passant]

OP, I hope your all of these ideas will benefit your "friend."

[DannyOcean_]

I'm an econ undergrad and I've already done an independent research project for class credit about something like this. Here's how my study went.

Lots of politicians and talking heads like to talk about third world poverty. Etc etc etc, they make a lot of unsubstantiated claims, like "the level of freedom needs to be higher to grow economically", or "without X level of average education, the economy will never grow", etc.

I'll call them 'soft' variables. Do they actually, empirically correlate to Third World GDP per capita increases?

I analyzed about 15 years worth of data for variables like education level, healthcare levels, political corruption, economic freedom, population growth rate, etc etc etc etc, and then did some fairly simple stat to see if there were correlations.

End result: Some did, some didn't, and none were that strong at all. Not very exciting.

But yeah, these ideas aren't that hard to come up with. gimme one night of sleep (i'm hitting the sack now), and i'll think of a few good ones.

[kipin]

I think something that analyzes real world situations that most people just overlook would be kind of interesting.

For example ... the economics of finding the optimal parking space, and if gender/race/wealth level/education levels effect people's optimization patterns.

I have in my head a theory about optimal parking spaces, but that isn't necessarily something that would be proven to be the most efficient if someone did research on it.

I am called a lazy parker because I park far away, at the first available spot that I can pull through next to another car, I just tell my friends that I am economizing parking and they just give me a dumb stare.

[imitation]

Do the stats of World of WarCraft Characters tell us anything about the players.

[rock1]

i'll take a shot

1. Do cities with "better" drinking water lead to healthier kids/higher test scores/etc?
2. Somehing along the lines of the major factors deterring americans from using public transportation more often?
3. how much of a difference do "most taleneted programs" in school actually make? if they make a difference should school not be broken down by grade levels, but instead by ability

[NLSoldier]

I did one of these on the determinants of winrate in poker.

it didnt turn out very well, but I can say that going to showdown a lot and being very aggressive on the turn will help you win!