Economics 312

Theory and Practice of Econometrics
Spring 2020
Assignments

There are two kinds of assignments for this class: daily assignments that are done individually and submitted at the beginning of each class session and weekly projects (usually) done in teams of two students and submitted (electronically) by midnight Mondays. Both daily assignments and weekly projects will be posted approximately one week before they are due.

Daily assignments

  1. January 29: Mean sum proof
  2. January 30: Stata commands
  3. January 31: OLS assumptions
  4. February 3: Maximum-likelihood estimators
  5. February 5: Monte Carlo methods
  6. February 6: Matrix methods
  7. February 7: Interpretation of simple regression results
  8. February 10: Interpretation of multiple regression results
  9. February 12: Multicollinearity
  10. February 13: Covariance matrix of beta-hat
  11. February 14: Confidence intervals
  12. February 17: Tests in the multiple regression model
  13. February 19: F tests
  14. February 20: Inconsistency of OLS estimators when u and x are correlated
  15. February 21: Interaction terms between x variables
  16. February 24: Quadratic terms in x
  17. February 26: Partial effects in log models
  18. February 27: Chow tests for stability of coefficients across samples
  19. February 28: (REVISED) Model-choice criteria
  20. March 2: Experimental data and differences in differences
  21. March 9: Heteroskedasticity
  22. March 11: Lag Operators
  23. March 12: Covariance matrix when the error is AR(1)
  24. March 13: Polynomial roots
  25. March 16: Breusch-Godfrey test
  26. April 1: Lagged effects in the ARDL model (delayed from March 30)
  27. April 1: Choosing a lag specification (also to be discussed on April 1)
  28. April 3: Dickey-Fuller test
  29. April 3: Cointegration (also to be discussed on April 3)
  30. April 6: Vector autoregression
  31. April 8: Pooled data
  32. April 10: Random effects
  33. April 13: Method of moments and instrumental variables
  34. April 15: Instrumental variables application
  35. April 17: Identification in simultaneous equations
  36. April 20: Seemingly unrelated regressions
  37. April 22: Probit interpretation
  38. April 25: Ordered probit
  39. April 27: Censorship

Weekly econometric projects

  1. February 3: Downloading data, getting them into Stata, and doing some simple analysis
  2. February 10: Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the sampling distribution of the OLS estimator with alternative distributions of the error term Files: olstest20.do  MC Class Demo.dta
  3. February 17: Does professor beauty affect student evaluations? Data set: Evals20.dta
  4. February 24: How are property values related to neighborhood characteristics? Data set: hprice.dta 
  5. March 2: Determinants of men's wage rates Data set: wage2_class.dta
  6. April 13: Analysis of U.S. and Euro Zone GDP  Data set: gfc.dta
  7. April 20: Unemployment in the U.S. states  Data set: Unemp_class.dta
  8. April 27: Estimating the elasticity of wholesale demand for fish  Data set: fish_proj.dta

Project Guidelines
Sample Project Report