Re-Writing Economic History

Revisions to official economic statistics are a fact of life. They happen all of the time. Many data are released on a "provisional" basis, and subsequently revised. Sometimes these revisions are quite minor, but there are also times when they can be downright embarrassing.

The 2012 Econometric Game

Last July I posted about the 2011 Econometric Game. The 2012 edition of the Game was held last month, with the top three places going to teams of students from the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, and Harvard University.

You'll find a list of the 30 competing teams here.

What a great venture!

© 2012, David E. Giles

EconometricsbySimulation

Francis Smart, a grad. student at Michigan State U., has written to me about his blog - EconometricsbySimulation.

As Francis says, "It is primarily a resource for students who want to learn new methods."

Francis has some nice Stata examples posted, and I'll certainly be following his blog.

© 2012, David E. Giles

Knoema Data Site

Always on the look-out for accessible data, I was interested to see this recent post on the Guardian's DataBlog site. It discusses a new site, Knoema, that was launched last month. They have a blog, that I'm adding to my blogroll.

We'll see how this all develops.

© 2012, David E. Giles

A Good Time to be an Economics Grad. Student?

Last Thursday, Neil Shah had this piece in the Wall Street Journal.

There'a a battle going on between the top U.S. economics departments for new and established talent. Of particular interest to economics grad. students, though:

"Established or not, economists are hot commodities. Last year, the average starting salary for new assistant economics professors was nearly $112,000 – the highest ever in inflation-adjusted terms and one of the highest across academic departments, according to the American Economic Association."

© 2012, David E. Giles

R Videos - and More

Some of us learn easily from the written word, but for most of us some visualization speeds up the process and generally helps with retention as well.

With that in mind I was delighted to see this nice list of free videos that demonstrate the use of R, posted on Ethan Fosse's blog, "Culture, Statistics, and Society".

Also of interest to econometricians will be Ethan's recent post outlining why he's dropped Stata completely in favour of R.

I'll be following his blog, for sure.

© 2012, David E. Giles

Bayes Estimators, Loss Functions, and J. M. Keynes

As a result of my recent post on Bayesian estimation of a simple consumption function, a few people emailed asking for proofs of the results that the Bayes estimator is the mean (a median) [a mode] of the posterior density, when the loss function is quadratic (absolute error) [zero-one].

Let's take a look at this, for the case of a single parameter.

Mathematicians and Economists

Tim Johnson posted a helpful comment on my recent post about Newton. This led tme to Tim's interesting blog called "Magic, Maths and Money".

I particularly enjoyed his two January posts there titled "Why Don't More Mathematicians See the Potential of Economics"; and "Why Don't More Economists See the Potential of Mathematics"

Good questions!

© 2012, David E. Giles

Newton and the Royal Mint

Sir Isaac Newton had a "day job" - Master of the Royal Mint, from 1699 until his death in 1727.

Stressful Times at Statistics Canada

An independent, well-funded, and well-staffed central statistical agency is a prerequisite for rational public policy-making. Statistics Canada is currently under a severe threat.

This is very bad news for those of us who use statistical data to do our jobs, but it's even worse news for the StatCan professionals who are directly affected.

© 2012, David E. Giles