About
I teach an introductory econometrics course at a small liberal arts college in Virginia. While there are several excellent textbooks, my students get too bogged down in the theory. They can often prove, for example, that an OLS coefficient is unbiased, I suspect the effort to be more memorization rather than understanding.
Without watering-down the course, I am ripping the band aid off and going without the traditional textbook in the fall of 2017. Inspired by Angrist & Pischke's 2017 NBER Working Paper "Undergraduate Econometrics Instruction: Through Our Classes, Darkly", my course will focus more on the doing of current econometrics techniques and issues of research design and causality than searching for the prized, but hard to find, "true" model. In addition to classroom instruction, students are required to read Mastering 'Metrics by Angrist & Pischke, several published journal articles, and my posted lecture notes.
My hope is that, come December, students will be novice yet functional applied econometricians who can "do" a variety of current methods and explain what they did to others. They will be well prepared to enter the labor force or graduate school with their econometrics toolkit.
This blog traces my adventure and provides several of the materials used in the course.
Without watering-down the course, I am ripping the band aid off and going without the traditional textbook in the fall of 2017. Inspired by Angrist & Pischke's 2017 NBER Working Paper "Undergraduate Econometrics Instruction: Through Our Classes, Darkly", my course will focus more on the doing of current econometrics techniques and issues of research design and causality than searching for the prized, but hard to find, "true" model. In addition to classroom instruction, students are required to read Mastering 'Metrics by Angrist & Pischke, several published journal articles, and my posted lecture notes.
My hope is that, come December, students will be novice yet functional applied econometricians who can "do" a variety of current methods and explain what they did to others. They will be well prepared to enter the labor force or graduate school with their econometrics toolkit.
This blog traces my adventure and provides several of the materials used in the course.