Socially conscious investors screen out stocks of alcohol and tobacco makers, firms with poor environmental records, and companies with poor labor practices. Some examples of "good," socially conscious companies are Johnson and Johnson, Dell Computers, Bank of America, and Home Depot. The question is, are such stocks overpriced? One measure of value is the P/E, or price-to-earnings ratio. High P/E ratios may indicate a stock is overpriced. For the S&P Stock Index of all major stocks, the mean P/E ratio is= 19.4. A random sample of36"socially conscious" stocks gave a P/E ratio sample mean ofx=17.7,with sample standard deviations=5.8.Does this indicate that the mean P/E ratio of all socially conscious stocks is different (either way) from the mean P/E ratio of the S&P Stock Index? Use= 0.05.

(a) What is the level of significance?

State the null and alternate hypotheses.

(b) What sampling distribution will you use? Explain the rationale for your choice of sampling distribution.

What is the value of the sample test statistic?

(c) Estimate theP-value.

Sketch the sampling distribution and show the area corresponding to theP-value.

(d) Based on your answers in parts (a) to (c), will you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis? Are the data statistically significant at level?

(e) Interpret your conclusion in the context of the application.