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Courtney Coile Spring 2007 Economics 203: Econometrics Wellesley College
Office: Pendleton 420 Office Hours: Phone: 283-2408 Tues 2:45-4:15pm Email: ccoile@wellesley.edu Wed 3:30-5:00pm and by appointment
Course Overview Does going to college increase your earnings? Does raising a country’s per capita income lead to a lower fertility rate? This course is designed to acquaint you with the statistical methods that economists use to test economic models and examine empirical relationships, primarily regression analysis. Although much of the course will focus on the mathematical development of the methodology, real world applications will be introduced frequently to demonstrate how these tools are used in practice. Students will learn to use a statistical software package, Stata, to analyze data. The final paper project will give students an opportunity to identify an interesting question and evaluate data to test their hypothesis.
Prerequisites To enroll in this course, you must have taken the following classes or their equivalent: Economics 103 (formerly QR199), Economics 101 and 102 (may be taking 102 concurrently), and Math 115.
Readings The required textbook for the course is Statistics and Econometrics: Methods and Applications by Orley Ashenfelter, Phillip Levine, and David Zimmerman (John Wiley and Sons, 2nd edition, 2006). The book is available at the college bookstore and will be on reserve at Clapp Library.
Course Meetings The course meets on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9:50-11:00 in Pendleton 129. Tuesday and Friday class meetings will be used for lectures. Most of the Wednesday class meetings will used for lab classes, which will generally be led by our TA, Heather Romani. Each of the lab classes will be structured around a short assignment designed to give you an opportunity to try out the concepts you’ve learned during the previous week; the assignment from each lab will be due the following Tuesday. The other Wednesday class meetings will be used for midterm review sessions and additional office hours for me to discuss your papers with you; see below for details.
Course Conference You will automatically be subscribed to the course conference. Please get in the habit of checking it when you check your email (note that you have to click on the conference icon to see if there are any new messages in the sub-conferences). I will use the conference to make announcements and post assignments, handouts, and replies to “one-minute papers,” and you can use it to ask questions of me or of your fellow students.
Course Requirements Grades will be based on problem sets (15%), two midterm exams (30% each), and a final paper (25%).
For the lab assignments, you should work in groups of two or three and turn in one assignment per group. Lab assignments should be turned in at the Tuesday class following the lab or emailed to the drop box section of the course conference by this time; late assignments will not be accepted.
For the final paper, you will work in groups of three to write an empirical research paper. Specifically, you will identify a topic and generate a hypothesis to be tested, review the literature to find other work in this area, find appropriate data, and evaluate the data to test your hypothesis using the methods learned in this class. Each group will have an opportunity to present its results to the class during the final two weeks of the course. It is critical to start working on the paper early in the semester to ensure that all these steps can be completed in time. To help you get an early start, each group will be required to submit a proposal on February 27 and some preliminary data analysis on April 10.
Both exams will be open-book, in-class exams. Midterm 1 covers units I-III on the syllabus and midterm 2 is cumulative with an emphasis on units IV-V.
Tues, Feb 27 Multiple Regression II: Dummy Variables ALZ, Chapter 12.1-12. Paper Proposal Due
Wed, Feb 28 Lab 4: Evaluating Statistical Significance and Goodness of Fit
Fri, March 2 Multiple Regression III: Categorical Variables/Interaction Terms ALZ, Chapter 12.1-12.
Tues, March 6 Multiple Regression IV: Hypothesis Testing ALZ, Chapter 12. Lab Assignment 4 Due
Wed, March 7 Lab 5: Running Multiple Regressions
Fri, March 9 Multiple Regression V: Using the Concepts Hakes and Sauer, “An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis”
Tues, March 13 Midterm Review Lab Assignment 5 Due
Wed, March 14 **** Midterm 1 ****
Fri, March 16 No Class
March 19-23 Spring Break – No Classes
IV. Violations of Assumptions
Tues, March 27 Violations of Assumptions I: Model Specification ALZ, Chapter 13.1-13.
Wed, March 28 Lab 6: Exploring Errors in Model Specification
Fri, March 30 Violations of Assumptions II: Multicollinearity ALZ, Chapter 13.5-13.
Tues, April 3 Violations of Assumptions III: Heteroskedasticity ALZ, Chapter 14.1-14. Lab Assignment 6 Due
Wed, April 4 No Lab; Available to Discuss Papers (PNE 420)
Fri, April 6 Violations of Assumptions IV: Heteroskedasticity/Serial Correlation ALZ, Chapter 14.1-14.
Tues, April 10 Violations of Assumptions V: Serial Correlation ALZ, Chapter 14. Paper Summary Statistics Due
Wed, April 11 Lab 7: Exploring Heteroskedasticity and Serial Correlation
V. Additional Topics
Fri, April 13 Additional Topics I: Panel Data Models ALZ, Chapter 18
Tues, April 17 No Class (Monday Schedule)
Wed, April 18 Lab 8: Using Panel Data Lab Assignment 7 Due
Fri, April 20 Additional Topics II: Dummy Dependent Variable Models ALZ, Chapter 16 Anderson, Butcher, and Levine, “Maternal Employment and Overweight Children”
Tues, April 24 Additional Topics III: Natural Experiment Techniques Lavy, “Do Gender Stereotypes Reduce Girls’ Human Capital Outcomes? Evidence from a Natural Experiment” Lab Assignment 8 Due
Wed, April 25 Midterm Review
Fri, April 27 **** Midterm 2 ****
VI. Class Presentations
Tues, May 1 How to Present a Research Paper
Wed, May 2 Ruhlman Conference – No Class
Fri, May 4 Class Presentations I
Tues, May 8 Class Presentations II
Wed, May 9 Class Presentations III
Mon, May 14 Final Paper Due
