Do undergraduate business students who major in finance earn, on average, higher annual starting salaries than their peers who major in marketing? Before addressing this question through a statistical hypothesis test, you should determine whether the variances of annual starting salaries of the two types of majors are equal. The file P09_23.xlsx contains (hypothetical) starting salaries of 50 randomly selected finance majors and 50 randomly chosen marketing majors.
a. Perform a test for equal population variances. Report a p-value and interpret its meaning.
b. Based on your conclusion in part a, which test statistic should you use in performing a test for the existence of a difference between population means? Perform this test and interpret the results.