ECO5046F/6000W
- Advanced Econometrics
Course Information
Introduction
This course is intended to equip students with practical econometric skills
at an advanced level. The skills you will develop in this course are vital in
empirical work involving econometrics, and will constitute an essential
ingredient in most jobs in the field of economics, whether in the public,
private or academic sector. More immediately, econometrics may prove very useful
for your research paper.
Pre-requisites and scope
The course assumes that you have done a basic econometrics course equivalent
to that taught in the UCT Honours year, i.e. we assume familiarity with the
material covered in Gujarati “Basic Econometrics”. The purpose of this course is
both to deepen and extend your understanding. We will introduce a number of new
estimation techniques. Throughout we will try to balance the theory with
practical applications.
Aims and objectives
The core aims of this course are:
- Get you to think!
Regression Analysis (and its variants) is a much abused tool in applied work. In
this course we want you to understand:
- how to set up an econometric problem in a sensible way
- the conditions under which the tools can be used appropriately
- how to estimate the models in the best way possible
- Help you to understand the literature
It is impossible to understand much of the advanced literature in economics
without a course of this type. A proper training should also provide you with
the “bull-sh*t” detectors necessary to separate good work from much of the dross
that is in circulation.
- Give you some hard skills
To this end we will try to introduce both new theoretical skills as well as
acquaint you with some of the relevant software.
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