ECON 4421: Introduction to Econometrics

Course Description

This is a first course in econometrics – a field that bridges statistics, economic theories, and empirical data. The focus of this course is causal inference. Although it’s generally necessary to conduct experiments for causal inference, doing experiments in economics – which involves human subjects – is limited for various reasons. Thus, econometrics is developed as a set of models and techniques for conducting causal inference with observational data (as opposed to experimental data). Throughout the semester, we’ll start with the theoretical framework (including a review of statistics and probability), then we’ll cover the implementation of regressions in R and work with dataset of various topics, such as education and labor economics. This course will likely be very useful for your career, as knowledge of econometrics is necessary for both advanced studies and professional development.

Topics Covered

• Review of statistics
• Simple linear regression
• Multiple linear regression
• Hypothesis Testing regarding linear regression models
• Group project (presentation)