Past posts on this blog have included several relating to Monte Carlo simulation - e.g., see here, here, and here.
© 2017, David E. Giles
Recently I came across a great article by Matthew Sigal and Philip Chalmers in the Journal of Statistics Education. It's titled, "Play it Again: Teaching Statistics With Monte Carlo Simulation", and the full reference appears below.
The authors provide a really nice introduction to basic Monte Carlo simulation, using R. In particular, they contrast using a "for loop" approach, with using the "SimDesign" R package (Chalmers, 2017).
Here's the abstract of their paper:
"Monte Carlo simulations (MCSs) provide important information about statistical phenomena that would be impossible to assess otherwise. This article introduces MCS methods and their applications to research and statistical pedagogy using a novel software package for the R Project for Statistical Computing constructed to lessen the often steep learning curve when organizing simulation code. A primary goal of this article is to demonstrate how well-suited MCS designs are to classroom demonstrations, and how they provide a hands-on method for students to become acquainted with complex statistical concepts. In this article, essential programming aspects for writing MCS code in R are overviewed, multiple applied examples with relevant code are provided, and the benefits of using a generate–analyze–summarize coding structure over the typical “for-loop” strategy are discussed."
The SimDesign package provides an efficient, and safe template for setting pretty much any Monte Carlo experiment that you're likely to want to conduct. It's really impressive, and I'm looking forward to experimenting with it.
The Sigal-Chalmers paper includes helpful examples, with the associated R code and output. It would be superfluous for me to add that here.
Needless to say, the SimDesign package is just as useful for simulations in econometrics as it is for those dealing with straight statistics problems. Try it out for yourself!
References
Chalmers, R. P., 2017. SimDesign: Structure for Organizing Monte Carlo Simulation Designs, R package version 1.7.
M. J. Sigal and R. P. Chalmers, 2016. Play it again: Teaching statistics with Monte Carlo simulation. Journal of Statistics Education, 24, 136-156.