Complex Survey Data in Econometrics

It's easy to forget that many of the standard results that we learn in statistics are based fairly and squarely on the assumption that the data are obtained by using simple random sampling.

In reality, this is rarely the case. Stratified  and cluster sampling are routinely used by our statistical agencies, and frequently the sampling process is much more complicated than that. So-called "Complex Survey" designs, which involve multi-stage stratification and clustering are very common.

This is something to watch out for in practice.

Access to Public Data

This item, from the Royal Statistical Society's RRSeNews site.

The U.K. Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 now requires public sector organisations to publish open data in a format that is standard and re-usable. Raw data that can't be used without further requests won't cut it any more. Neither will data that are available "electronically", but only in a format that fails to meet open standards.

Goodbye .pdf files, hello .csv files!

This is good news. Of course, there's a kicker - the amendment to the Act allows the public sector to charge for this service.

This development stands in juxtaposition to Statistics Canada initiative of late 2011 (see here), whereby more data are now being offered without charge, but the data aren't necessarily available in a ready-to-use format.

I guess we're making progress here!

© 2012, David E. Giles

And the Winner is......

R will overtake SAS and SPSS in 2015 - according to David Smith in his post on the Revolutions blog.

I can believe that!

© 2012, David E. Giles

A First Lesson in Econometrics

Just in case you haven't previously seen John Siegfried's 1970 piece in the JPE.......... (or here - thanks Dimitriy!)


(H-T to Jia Liu for reminding me of this.)

© 2012, David E. Giles

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