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Quantitative Methods Exam Help

The document contains solutions to 3 quantitative methods exam problems: 1) Calculating marginal returns to schooling and experience, and determining if returns are increasing or decreasing. 2) Finding the ages at which earnings are maximized for people with different education levels. 3) Calculating lifetime earnings for people retiring at 65 with 8 or 16 years of education, using integration or summation.

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27 views

Quantitative Methods Exam Help

The document contains solutions to 3 quantitative methods exam problems: 1) Calculating marginal returns to schooling and experience, and determining if returns are increasing or decreasing. 2) Finding the ages at which earnings are maximized for people with different education levels. 3) Calculating lifetime earnings for people retiring at 65 with 8 or 16 years of education, using integration or summation.

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Statistics Exam Help
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Quantitative Methods Exam Help


Problem 1.

Calculate the marginal return to Schooling and the marginal return


to Experience, i.e. the first derivative of wages with respect to
schooling and with respect to experience. Note: Experience equals
Age Minus Schooling Minus 6. Give an intuitive description of the
marginal return functions. Calculate the second derivatives. Are
marginal returns to experience increasing or decreasing? Are
marginal returns to schooling increasing or decreasing?
Problem 2.

Calculate the age at which people reach maximum earnings. Do


this calculation for three different education profiles: those with 8,
12, 16 years of schooling. At what ages are wages maximized?
What are the values of wages at which wages are maximized?
Problem 3.

Calculate the lifetime earnings of someone with 8 years of


education who retires at 65 and the lifetime earnings of someone
with 16 years of education who retires at 65. This can be done with
a summation or with an integral.
Solution
Solution 1.

Calculating Marginal Returns to Schooling(MRS) and Marginal


Returns to Experience(MRE) implies doing the
firstdifferentiation. As shown in STATA result, the regression
equation with appropriate coefficients is:

ln wage

And, Marginal Return to Schooling(MRS) can be obtained


through first differentiating lnWage with respect to S:

Since we still have experience term (X) in the differentiated


equation, marginal return is not only changes according to
schooling but also to experience. Holding experience constant, we
can see that the increase in schooling results in the increase in
MRS. This gives you an idea that an additional education makes
your wage increases more rapidly.

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That is, an additional education not only increases the whole
amount of wage, but also sppeds up the rate of increase in wage.
This can be proved by checking out the second derivative

The second derivative result, which is positive, shows us that the


regression equation with respect to schooling has a minimum
value, not maximum. Therefore, we can conclude that the more
education a person receives, the higher percentage
change(positively) in lnWage, that is, the more wage s/he can earn
with increasing rate.

The same logic can be applied to experience. We first differentiate


and get Marginal Return to Experience(MRE):

Interestingly, the Marginal Return to Experience seems to decrease


as a person’s experience increases. (You can simply plug numbers
in X) The second derivative is :

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Contrast to the case of schooling, the sign of the second derivative
is negative. This means the experience has a maximum point at
which the rate of increase becomes zero and then turn to negative.
But, remember that the “wage” will be still increasing with
decreasing rate until the original function hits zero.

Solution 2.

The question is asking you to do the first differentiation with


respect to age variable, then put it equal to zero to figure out an
optimal point. You can also substitute AGE for EX into the
previous equation, then differentiate. Many people did the
differentiation first, and replaced EX with AGE. This way of
calculation, luckily, worked out in this particular case, but not
necessarily all the time. It is a special case that the relationship
between EX and AGE is exactly linear, which could give you a
correct answer. Otherwise, you will encounter a different answers.
Think about the example of f(x) = ax2 + bx + c and x = ez + f.
Then, compare when you differentiate f(x) with respect to x, then
insert ez + f instead of x vs. differentiate f(z) = a(ez + f)2 + b(ez +
f) + c with respect to z. Unless e = 0, you will have different
answers. We will probably cover this later in the course.

ln wage

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The first differentiation will be :

FOC is:

The age at which a person’s wage reaches to maximum depends on


the years of schooling. If we plug different years of education in the
equation of 8, 12 and 16 years, we have 46.7, 48.4 and 50.2,
respectively. Noticeably, although the education years are different
by 4 years, the age of maximum does not show that much of
difference. This implies that a person with higher education earns
faster (as though he compensates his opportunity cost of schooling)
to reach the maximum wage of his. And this result supports the
previous question’s answer.

Then, what about the actual value of earning at the maximum point?
Simply, plug the age we just calculated into the original equation.
Since the education years are given (8, 12 and 16 years), we can
calculate lnWage at maximum for each schooling years. I obtained
1.9 for 8 years, 2.1 for 12 years and 2.5 for 16 years. This is the
natural log form, so we transform these values to real wage:
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lnWage = 1.9

Therefore, if a person has 8 years of education, s/he will reach


her/his maximum wage when s/he becomes 46.7 years old and the
wage itself is $ 67,000 a year. (I assumed that the unit might be in
$ 10,000) In the same way, I got 8 dollars per hour for 12 years of
education and $ 120,000 for 16 years of education.

Solution 3.

This is an integral question. You can either do the integration with


respect to age or experience. Just mind the upper and lower bounds
when you change the terms that you are integrating. Here, I chose
experience. Writing integration for experience gives :

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Following the integral rule, you plug upper bound and lower bound
into the equation, then subtract the lowerbound value from the
upperbound value. Here, the lower bound is 0, so you only need to
get the value of upperbound. (plugging 0 into the integral equation
will only result in 0). The calculation gives 90.8 for 8 years of
education and 107.4 for 16 years. These numbers are the
accumulation of percentage changes in wage. (Recall that the
dependent variable was lnWage) Thus, it does not correctly convert
to the total wage a person earned. This can be obtained by:

This should eventually come close to a normal curve. It should be


very hard to solve this equation by hand, so I used some help of
Matlab. When a person has 8-year schooling, the lifetime earning
of the person is $ 2,979,533. For a 16-year schooling person, the
lifetime earning is $ 4,722,841. You can also use Excel for the
calculation. Inserting each value of experience from 1 to 51 (or 43)
into the equation and summing them up will give you similar
result.

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