Assignment 7: Design your own Field Experiment

Author: Emma Gould

1. Does proximity to dining halls with late night hours lead to lower student health, as
measured by BMI?

2. Its important to know the answer because students on Brown meal plan who live near
dining halls with late hours have easier access to late night food options than those who
live farther away. This raises the question of whether those in close proximity to late
night eateries actually eat more unhealthily. The results of this experiment could help
Residential Life distribute students more optimally across dorms by including proximity to
late night eateries and its health consequences as a determinant of where a student
should live.

3. Observational studies would not control for all factors that may influence the effect of
proximity to late night eateries on health, nor randomize factors of interests to subjects.
Brown students are very diverse, and comparing their health levels against each other
based solely on what dorm they live in could lead to omitted variable bias. For instance, I
hypothesize that students who live closer to late night dining halls have more friends who
also live closer, and are hence more likely to be dragged to Jos after a Friday night out
to munch on a chicken sandwich and some curly fries. This would bias the estimate of
the effects of proximity to Jos (or Andrews) on student health upward in absolute value.

4. a) My subjects are Brown sophomores and juniors living on campus and enrolled in the
full meal plan. I will start recruiting them in the spring before the treatment period (fall
2017) by emailing freshmen and sophomores about the opportunity to participate in an
experiment in exchange for a monetary reward. Interested individuals will fill out an
eligibility survey online indicating whether they want to live on campus the following year
and whether they want to stay on the meal plan. Then, eligible students will go through a
screening where they are weighed and answer questions about their eating and exercise
habits, social life and more. Each eligible student will be matched as closely as possible
to another eligible student with similar characteristics, including year, gender, race,
fitness level or BMI, hometown, alcohol/drug usage, etc. Students who cannot be
matched will not participate. Within each pair, subjects will be randomly assigned to live
in a close-proximity dorm or an isolated dorm the following year (assuming Residential
Life has consented to the experiment). I chose to exclude freshmen from the experiment
to control for the possible threat of the freshman 15 effect.

b) My treatment group will be the students that are assigned to live in a close-proximity
dorm, either New Dorm or Grad Center. Both house sophomores and juniors and are
within 2 minutes walking distance from Jos, a campus eatery open until 2am. My control
group will be the students that are assigned to live in an isolated dorm, either Minden
 Hall, Hope College or Slater Hall. All house sophomores and juniors and are at least 5-7
minutes walking distance from either Jos or Andrews Commons.

c) Students in the treatment group will be assigned to live in a close-proximity dorm,

while students in the control group will be assigned to live in an isolated dorm. Every
subjects weight and BMI will be taken note of on the first day of the fall semester. Meal
plan usage at Jos between midnight and 2am will be monitored throughout the
semester. At the end, subjects will be weighed again and their BMIs will be recalculated.
The difference between the BMIs of the treatment group minus the difference between
the BMIs of the control group will be the coefficient of interest.

5. Since each subject in the treatment group will have a match in the control group, the
groups will be relatively balanced. Matches will always be of the same year, gender and
overall fitness level as measured by BMI. Other characteristics matches may share
include eating habits, hometown, race, alcohol/drug habits, ownership of a car or bike,
concentration, etc. I would compare the randomized groups over these factors and make
sure there is no statistically significant difference in the variables between the two
groups.

6. ITT: Y i = 0 Z i + 1 X i + E i
Z i = 1 if student lives in close-proximity dorm
= 0 if student lives in isolated dorm
Y i = (treatment subjects final BMI - initial BMI) - (control subjects final BMI - initial BMI)
X i = student controls
E i = error term
0 = estimate of the impact of living in a close-proximity dorm on students health

The ITT equation provides an estimate of the impact of living in a dorm in close proximity
to a late night eatery on student health as measured by the difference in changes in BMI
between the treatment and control groups.

7. 1st stage: N i = 0 Z i + 1 X i + i
Z i = 1 if student lives in close-proximity dorm
= 0 if student lives in isolated dorm
N i = predicted probability of students using meal credits or points at late night eateries
between midnight and 2am
X i = student controls
i = error term
0 = estimate of the impact of living in a close-proximity dorm on the probability of using
meal credits/points at late night eateries between 12am and 2am
 The first stage equation provides an estimate of the impact of living in a dorm in close
proximity to a late night eatery on the probability of using meal swipes or points at that
eatery during late night hours.

The exclusion principle is met if the instrument (being in close proximity to a late night
eatery) is uncorrelated with the error term, meaning that the only way in which being in
close proximity to late night eateries is correlated with health is through the use of meal
credits and points there between midnight and 2am, after all other regular dining halls
are closed. Since the assignment to each treatment is random, this should hold true. The
relevance condition is met if 0 is statistically significant, meaning that proximity to late
night eateries is a good predictor for the use of meal swipes at the relevant eatery.

8. 2nd stage/TOT: Y i = 0 N i + 1 X i + i
N i = probability of students using meal credits or points at late night eateries between
12am and 2am
Y i = students final BMI - initial BMI
X i = student controls
i = error term
0 = estimate of the impact of using meal credits or points at late night eateries between
12am and 2am on students health

The TOT equation provides an estimate of the impact of using meal credits or points at
late night eateries between 12am and 2am on students health, as measured by BMI.
The TOT effect will be the same as the ITT effect if 0 =1 or if all students who live in
proximity to a late night eatery actually use more swipes there during the late window
(relative to the control groups use of swipes at the late night eateries they are far away
from). If not all close-proximity students use more swipes, 0 <1 and the ITT effect is
smaller than the TOT effect ( 0 < 0 ).

9. My results may be generalizable to other students on meal plan who did not participate
in the experiment but live in similar proximity to late night eateries as either the treatment
or control groups. However, they may not share the same characteristics as the
particular sample of students who participated, rendering the results less generalizable.