Essay The Gini Coefficient and GDP Capita – Report Writing – Economics Assignment Help

Assignment Task:

Part 1

A team of researchers sets out on an ambitious project. They want to test the effects of absolute and relative wealth on well-being (life satisfaction/happiness). To do so, they randomly sample 1000 sub-national regions out of all regions in the world. For each region, they measure satisfaction with life (well-being) on a 0-100 scale where 100 is the happiest. To capture absolute wealth, they collect data on GDP/capita in each region in 1000 US dollars. Relative wealth is measured using the Gini-index. It ranges from 0-100, where 100 implies that all wealth is in the hands of one person and 0 implies perfect equality. Please check the dataset “econdata.csv”.

Life Satisfaction 0-100 (100 = most happy, 0 = least happy, 50 = neither happy nor unhappy )

Gini Coefficient 0-100 (100 = 1 person owns everything, 0 – everyone owns the same)

GDP/capita in 1000 US dollars

Questions

1. Formulate hypotheses for both wealth variables and justify them. Please introduce the research question to the reader.
2. Regress life satisfaction on the Gini coefficient and GDP captia (live satisfaction is the dependent variable) and present your results in a publican-style regression table. Also run two bivariate models for each of your independent variables.
3. Compare you multiple regression model to the results from bivariate models. Discuss model fit.
4. Interpret your multiple regression model in statistical and in substantive terms.
5. Construct confidence intervals around the estimates of the coefficient for the Gini Goefficient and the coefficient for GDP/captia and interpret them.
6. Re-examine the scatter plots, and address non-linearities. Please try running a fourth model using the tools to address non-linearity.

Part 2

You work as a strategist for the Democratic Party and plan for the next U.S. presidential election. Your task is to come up with a recommendation on countering racialised messages by the sitting President Donald Trump. Specifically, the idea is to counter such racial messages by calling them out as racist.

Racial priming theory suggests that this is an effective strategy to counter politicians who use racial messages. Motivated reasoning theory, however, predicts that such a strategy will not affect voters who themselves hold racially conservative views—it may even be counter-productive. Your task is to adjudicate between these competing theories and to make a recommendation on using a racialised counterstrategy against Donald Trump.

Theoretical Background

Racial priming theory suggests that racial messages work as long as they are implicit and thereby do not violate norms of equality. Overtly racist messages are rejected because they do violate prevailing norms. Therefore, racial messages are effective if they use code, e.g., by replacing black with inner-cities or showing images that are suggestive rather than definite. According to racial priming theory, such implicit messages can be countered by calling out the messenger. Support for the user of such messages decreases across the board. Furthermore, the effect should be stronger among racially conservative voters than among racially liberal voters because: “it is highly resentful people who are most likely to face strong social censure if they speak their minds, since their views are the ones most often subject to the charge of racism. They are the ones who suffer the most severe reaction should they express their views fully.”

Motivated reasoning theory suggests that people are driven to draw a particular conclusion in defense of their political attitudes, beliefs and identities. One example of people’s motivation is the attempt to maintain a positive image of someone they like. In the specific Trump example, racially conservative whites will resist the racialised counter-strategy because they are unwilling to accept negative information about a candidate that they are predisposed to like. For instance, when white racial conservatives are presented with an argument that the death penalty is unfair to blacks, this information does not lead them to be less supportive of the policy. Instead, they scrutinize the argument and increase their support for the policy.