Econometrician

Example

If the researcher could randomly assign people to different levels of education, the resulting data set would allow estimation of the effect of changes in years of education on wages. In reality, those experiments cannot be conducted. Instead, the econometrician observes the years of education and the wages paid to people who differ along many dimensions. Given this kind of data, the estimated coefficient on years of education in the equation above reflects both the effect of education on wages and the effect of other variables on wages, if those other variables were correlated with education. For example, people born in certain places may have higher wages and higher levels of education. Unless the econometrician controls for place of birth in the above equation, the effect of birthplace on wages may be falsely attributed to the effect of education on wages.