Using a random sample of 670 individuals for the population of people in the workforce in 1976, we want to estimate the impact of education on wages. Let wage denote hourly wage in 1976 U.S. dollars and let educ denote years of schooling. We obtain the following OLS regression line: wage = -0.54 + 0.54educ. How do you interpret the slope of this regression line? What is the expected difference in the hourly wage between a worker that finished four years of college and a worker with finished high school? What is the predicted wage for a person with one year of education? Does that make sense? If it is not, what is the name of this problem in econometrics? How do we deal with it?
Suppose you are interested in the effect of skipping classes on college GPA, and collect a sample of economic variables from 400 college students to analyze the problem. Included in your data are college GPA on a four-point scale (COLGPA), high school GPA on a four-point scale (HSGPA), achievement test score (ATS), and the average number of Economics 122B lectures missed per week (SKIP). Running a regression of the dependent variable COLGPA on the other explanatory variables including a constant (and homoskedastic errors) yields: