Applied Statistics and Econometrics

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: Professor Ron Smith
• Assessment: an examination (70%) and empirical project (30%)

Economists have been described as people who are good with numbers but not creative enough to be accountants. This module is designed to ensure that you are good with numbers, and that you can interpret and analyse economic and financial data and develop a critical awareness of some of the pitfalls in collecting, presenting and using data.

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• explain how measures of economic variables such as GDP, unemployment, price level and other index numbers are constructed
• show awareness of the limitations of economic data and calculate derived statistics from the data, e.g. ratios, growth rates
• use a spreadsheet to graph data and calculate summary statistics, and interpret the graphs and summary statistics
• use simple rules of probability involving joint, marginal and conditional probabilities, expected values and variances
• explain the basic principles of estimation and hypothesis testing
• derive the Least Squares estimator and its properties
• interpret simple regression output and conduct tests on coefficients
• read and understand articles using economic data at the level of the FT or Economist
• conduct and report on a piece of empirical research that uses simple statistical techniques.