ECON 104 UCLA Descriptive Statistics of Selected Variables Questions

In the ?rst assignment, you evaluated the e?ect of a get out the vote experiment on

voting rates. Voters were randomly assigned to a treatment group (who were called) and a

control group (who were not called). The hope is that, through randomization, the control

group provides an accurate counterfactual for the rate at which people in the treatment

group would have voted in the absence of the encouraging phone call.

For this homework, you will determine if we can get an unbiased estimate of the treatment

e?ect using a treatment that people have to opt into. The treatment for this homework is

actually answering and listening to the entire call. That is, not all people selected to receive

a phone call actually answered the phone or listened to the message until the end. The point

of this homework is to see if you can get the “right” estimate (similar in magnitude to the

experimental estimate from the ?rst homework) in a non-experimental setting.

Use the datasets on Canvas for Assignment 2. The datasets include only people the

researchers tried to call (i.e., the dataset only includes those with treatreal=1 from the

data you used in Assignment 1). The variable contact is equal to 1 for people who actually

received and listened to the entire call and 0 otherwise. We can think of people who listened

to the call as opting into the treatment in the sense that they were available to receive the call

and did not just hang up. Those who did not ?nish listening to the call are the comparison

group. The variables in the datasets are the same as those in the ?rst assignment.