I. Gender
Qian (2008) tests whether increased relative female income affects preferences for girls or boys.
- How does she test this? What empirical strategies are used? Are the strategies credible?
- Do her results necessarily imply that more girls survive when girls are more profitable? What is the additional piece of evidence that she uses to argue that last point?
Jensen and Oster (2009) analyze whether cable TV affects women’s status.
- Why should economists care about cable TV?
- Why would TV have an effect on women’s status?
- How do they analyze the question (focus in particular on how they try to deal with omitted variables)?
- What do they find and do you think the results are internally valid?
- Can they distinguish between different mechanisms and are the results externally valid?
II. Climate change and development
- Why could a changing climate affect poor countries' ability to develop and prosper? Which countries to you expect to be the most affected in the positive and negative direction?
- Discuss how the effect of climate change on development can be tested empirically and which empirical challenges the researcher has to face.
- Explain the approach followed by Dell et al. (2012) and discuss to what extent it solves the challenged set out above.
- To what extent are Dell et al. able to estimate the effect of the climate and not only the weather?
- To what extent can they separate the effect of the climate from the effect of geography