What's Your Favourite Estimator?

It's interesting to dwell on the popularity of different estimators that econometricians use. Some estimators are "in vogue" for a period, and then give way to others as new developments come along. Different topics have captured the attention of theoreticians and practitioners alike at different times in history.

Here's a Google Ngram showing the extent to which some familiar estimators for simultaneous equations models have been mentioned in books since 1960:

Not too surprisingly, good old OLS just goes on and on:

I was going to include the GMM estimator in these plots, but this acronym has meanings other than the obvious one that comes to mind. So, the results would have been misleading. To be safe, let's use the full phrase Generalized Method of Moments and allow for case sensitivity:

Interestingly, the phrase appeared in some books before the publication of Hansen's classic 1982 paper.

© 2013, David E. Giles

Flowers for Mom - From Quandl

Today being Mothers' Day in many parts of the world, I thought that flowers would be appropriate. Well, a price index for (Gardens, Plants, and) Flowers. Specifically, a harmonized price index for these goods for 27 European Union countries.

I retrieved the monthly data for the period January 2006 to March 2013 from Quandl.com - a really nice resource that I posted about recently.  As well as downloading the data in various formats, reading the data from R, etc., you can also embed an interactive chart of the data directly into a document such as this one, and make the data visible to viewers.