Temporary Teaching Appointment(s)

My department is looking for one or more people to take up temporary teaching appointments in 2015.

Fields of interest include corporate finance, macroeconomics, issues in European integration, 

money and banking, environmental economics, and labour economics. 

Sorry - not econometrics!

These positions would suit someone who's on leave from their home institution.

Full details, and the application procedure, can be found here. Please spread the word!

© 2014, David E. Giles

Congratulations to My Colleague!

This afternoon I had the pleasure of attending the annual Teaching, Research, and Service Awards ceremony for our Faculty of Social Sciences here at the University of Victoria. Our Dean, Peter Keller, does a great job with this event. I was especially grateful for the food, as I'd missed out on lunch today!

However, the real highlight was the presentation of the Research Award to my colleague, Kees van Kooten. Kees is an outstanding researcher who holds a (Tier 1) Canada Research Chair in our department, and the award was both richly deserved and long overdue.

Congratulations, Kees!

© 2014, David E. Giles

Congratulations, Graham Voss!

Congratulations to my departmental colleague, Graham Voss, whose promotion to full Professor takes effect today!

Graham describes his research interests as: "Applied macroeconomics with a focus on monetary and fiscal policies and exchange rates". He's a very accomplished empirical macroeconomist, with extensive experience at The Reserve Bank of Australia (their central bank) to complement his academic contributions.

Here's his webpage.

© 2013, David E. Giles

National Centre for Econometric Research

Australia has one, but Canada doesn't. What is it?

Half a Million

Getting close to half a million page-views ........ Thanks!

© 2012; David E. Giles

The Demand for Easter Eggs in China

I was going to begin this post by saying "Now, here's a book I wish I'd written." But I got cold feet!

The 2011-2016 Outlook for Demand for Chocolate Easter Eggs in Greater China can be yours for only $495 from Amazon.com. That's the paperback edition, of course. Come on - I know you're tempted. I mean to say - chocolate!

Check it out for yourself, and as with everything chocolate - enjoy!

© 2013, David E. Giles

How Many Econometricians Does it Take?

In the December 2012 issue of Significance, a monthly magazine now published jointly by the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society, there's an interesting article titled, "Statistics of Statisticians: Critical Masses for Research Groups".

In this article, Ralph Kenna and Beretrand Berche discuss the idea of critical mass when it comes to the size of research groups in various disciplines. They explain how the so-called "Ringelmann effect" in sociology can be tested, and how this leads to measures of an upper bound on group sizes, "... above which research quality either tends not to improve or the rate of improvement starts to level out."

Promoting Econometrics

A post today on the "Simply Statistics" blog is titled, "Statistics/Statisticians Need Better Marketing". 

I liked it a lot, and much of the content could be applied to the econometrics community. 

However, one of the suggestions worried me a bit - namely:

"Whenever someone does something with data, we should claim them as a statistician."

I'm not sure I'd like to claim as an econometrician, anyone who does some empirical analysis involving economic data. Goodness knows there's an awful lot of garbage out there! And it's produced by people I wouldn't call econometricians, even if that's how they describe tehmselves!

But maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy.

© 2012, David E. Giles

Summertime!

It's been a quiet week at the lake - specifically, no internet access! And hence no posts.

I haven't been able to respond to comments and requests either, so please accept my apology for that.

Yes, I know I should be better organized!

Mark Thoma in "The Browser"

It was nice to see this interview with Mark Thoma in The Browser today.

Enjoy!

© 2012, David E. Giles

Econometrics Beat on Twitter

Last week I finally caved in and joined Twitter!

My intention is to use it in tandem with this blog, but we'll see how that works out. I might get totally carried away.

I'll be tweeting @DEAGiles.

© 2012, David E. Giles

ANZecmet

The following was circulated yesterday by Rob Hyndman, at Monash University:

"ANZecmet is a mailing list intended for econometricians in Australia and New Zealand, but may be of interest to a wider audience. It provides a forum for exchanging views, posting technical questions and responses, job advertisements, conference announcements, new publications, and so on.

The ANZecmet mailing list used to be hosted by Monash University, but is now in the process of moving to a Google group. If anyone on this list would like to join, please head over to

http://groups.google.com/group/anzecmet/about and sign up."

Econometrics has a long-standing and very strong presence in Australia and New Zealand. I've signed up, and I hope some of you will too.

© 2012, David E. Giles

Festive Fun for all of the Family?

Courtesy of the Royal Statistical Society - The Great Significance Christmas Quiz!!

Choconomics

My wife enjoys travelling with me to conferences, so I guess I'll be in Belgium next September for this one!

Webinar With Robert F. Engle

It's not every day that you can get to see a presentation by a Nobel laureate econometrician for free, and without leaving home.

Terribly Simple, But Simply Terrible

Last Saturday there was a general election in New Zealand, where I've been visiting for the past couple of weeks. In conjunction with this election there was also a referendum on the future of the voting system that they use. For about 17 years now they have used a "Mixed Member Proportional" (MMP) system.

Spurious Precision

I'm currently in New Zealand - hence the smaller number of posts recently - and I came across the following example of a "best before" date on the lid of a jar of marmalade:

Trends in Econometrics

In an earlier post I mentioned the online conference that was organized by Wiley and The Journal of Economic Surveys over the past few days.

Here is the link to David Hendry's keynote lecture, "Trends in Econometrics", together with organized commentaries from Neil Ericsson and Katerina Juselius.

Great stuff! We need more of this.

© 2011, David E. Giles

The Econometrics Channel

Coming very soon, to a YouTube near you - Numberphile!

A Real Econometrics Seminar

Last Friday we were treated to a particularly good seminar in our Department. Sílvia Gonçalves (here, at Université de Montréal) presented a paper, "Bootstrapping factor-augmented regression models" (joint with Benoit Perron). Yes, an actual Econometrics seminar!