Question

A researcher wants to study the causal effect of having spent time in prison on wages. She collects data on wages for a sample of individuals who have been incarcerated but have been out of prison for at least ten years. She then collects data on wages for people who have never been incarcerated. She also plans to collect information on age, education, ethnicity and occupation. Her idea is to regress wages on a dummy indicating whether a person has been incarcerated or not controlling for the other variables she collected. Your job is to critique this research plan. Over a few lines, no more than a quarter of a page, explain the most important potential problem(s) with this plan and also give some suggestions on how the plan might be improved.

*summarized answer

Answer 1

Since the researcher wants to regress the wages on a dummy indicating whether a person has been incarcerated or not controlling the other variables (age, education, ethnicity and occupation) she has collected, i must say her plan is great but the fact that wages are not rather should not be dependent on ethnicity, so ethnicity should not be used as a dependent variable . Although it can be used for demonstration of the demography. Other than this, all looks good.