Hello, dear friend, you can consult us at any time if you have any questions, add WeChat: daixieit

ECON 3210

BIG DATA ECONOMETRICS

FINAL EXAMINATION

TERM 2, 2022

Question

Read and provide a report evaluating Banerjee et al. (2020). Your evaluation and discussion of the paper should be guided by the following broad categories:

.    What is the main objective of the research? Describe the context and motivation.

.    What are the research strategy and main assumptions? Describe the form of the data and sample and identify the strengths and weaknesses of the overall approach.

.    What are the key results and how were they determined? What are the significance and implications of the results?

.    What is your overall evaluation of the paper in terms of addressing the main objective and in terms of the clarity of the presentation?

Your report should provide a coherent summary and evaluation of the paper and not stand- alone answers to these categories of questions. You undertook a similar exercise in the week 7 tutorial. Here though, the length of your report is likely to be longer reflecting the length of the allocated paper and the opportunity for you togo into more detail.

As part of your report, you should also address the following questions. Please note that again you should work your responses into your summary rather than provide stand-alone answers.

1.    Why is means testing based on taxable income not a viable option for determining eligibility for anti-poverty programs in many developing countries?

2.    What is the purpose of including Fig 1?

3.    Why was the choice of flat-screen televisions and cell-phone SIM cards as the treatment assets an important element of the research design?

4.    How does the data used in the research design reflect the current big data environment?

5.    What role does the double-LASSO approach (we called this double-selection in

lectures) play in the estimation of equation (1)? Does it matter that the controls

selected from this approach vary across the different asset equations (see footnote 12)?

6.    What is revealed by comparing results of Panels A and B of Table1?

7.    How are the results in column (3) of Table 2 used to support one of their main findings?

For each of the above questions that is not adequately addressed, 2 marks will be deducted from your overall grade on the exam.

Report details

Your report will be evaluated on the quality of the evaluation and one dimension of quality is being able to express your ideas and analysis concisely. Hence, we suggest a maximum   word count of 1500 words. This is for your guidance and examiners will not check word    counts and there will be no penalties for minor discrepancies. The report should be typed and saved to a document using your SID in the name,e.g. z1234567.doc.  Upload the document via the Turnitin submission link on the Moodle website.

Article to review

Banerjee,A., Hanna, R. Olken, B.A., and Sumarto, S. (2020), “The (lack of) distortionary effects of proxy-means tests: Results from a nationwide experiment in Indonesia”, Journal of Public Economics Plus, 1, 100001.

The article is available under the “Final Exam" tab on the course Moodle page. The article refers to supplementary materials, but these are not required for the exam.