Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Thinking with Data

A good supplementary text on econometrics; Econometrics and Data Analysis for Developing Countries

Related;
Download Data Files for the book
Journal of Applied Econometrics Data Archive
World Income Inequality Database V 2.0b May 2007

CDS: MPhil Course 102 (Instructor: Chandan Mukherjee) see their Class Notes

Review of the Book by Stata;
Chandan Mukherjee, Howard White, and Marc Wuyts provide an interesting introduction to econometrics in Econometrics and Data Analysis for Developing Countries.

The authors cover an impressive range of topics, emphasizing the importance of model specification and evaluating different methods for obtaining acceptable specifications. They also discuss several graphical methods that are frequently overlooked in treatments of econometrics and point out that graphical methods can be informative even without p-values.

This book does not discuss methods that are robust to distributional assumptions and does not make it clear that only small-sample statistics require the normality assumption of linear regression to be valid. (Asymptotically, the standard errors are consistent, and the test statistics converge to standard distributions without assuming that the disturbances are normally distributed.) If you are interested in a more formal treatment of this topic with emphasis on robust methods, you might want to supplement this book with Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach (Wooldridge 1999).

What this book does well is provide practical approaches to data analysis and model development, with an emphasis on development economics. It will be a valuable tool for those who need to analyze policy based on quantitative information.


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