Economic Statistics

"Regression analysis is the agora of empirical economics, the site were significance testing shops and struts and gossips about. Technically speaking, it's easy to do. It's curve fitting. A finding from masses of data some slopes of lines, showing effect. Statistically estimating the slope of a line, using regression analysis, is in truth pretty simple and even fun. It's like finding faces in clouds. Or smiles, anyway."
Stephen T. Ziliak

e-mail: sgabriel@mtholyoke.edu

SPRING 2001

The textbook used in this course is Statistics for Management and Economics by Keller and Warrack, fifth edition.

Read chapter 1 prior to the first class on January 29th. The following are the weekly topics to be covered in Economics 220 and the associated readings from the above mentioned text:

Week 1 (1/29/01 - 2/2/01): Graphical Descriptive Techniques
Read chapters 2 and 3 of the text.
For supplemental reading on the web, click on this line.
For some interesting examples of econ stat graphs, see
White House Economic Statistics Briefing Room

Week 2 (2/5/01 - 2/9/01): Numerical Descriptive Measures
Read chapter 4 of the text.

Week 3 (2/12/01-2/16/01): Data Collection and Sampling
Read chapter 5 of the text.

Week 4 (2/19/01 - 2/23/01): Probability Distributions
Read chapters 6 and 7 of the text.

Week 5 (2/26/01 - 3/9/01): Sampling Distributions
Read chapter 8 of the text.

Week 6-7 (3/12/01 - 3/30/01): Introduction to Estimation and Hypothesis Testing
Read chapters 9 and 10 of the text.

Week 8 (4/2/01 - 4/6/01): Single Population Inference
Read chapter 11 of the text

Week 9 (4/9/01 - 4/13/01): Two Population Inference
Read chapter 12 of the text

Week 10 (4/16/01 - 4/20/01): Simple Linear Regression
Read chapter 17 of the text.

Week 11 (4/23/01 - 4/27/01): Multiple Regression
Read chapter 18 of the text.

Week 12 (4/30/01 - 5/4/01): Model Building
Read chapter 19 of the text.

Week 13 (5/7/01): Final Review Session
Some sample questions (mostly t and z)

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