Happy Birthday, "Your Better Life Index"

One year ago, the OECD released its Your Better Life Index. The Index sought to provide comparative data relating to well-being that go beyond the traditional economic output measures such as GDP.

I analyzed some of the YBLI data in a few posts last year - here, here, and here.

The YBLI has been re-released (updated) today. The OECD tells us:

"Some of the key takeaways from the new version of the Index include:

• No matter which countries people live in, they value the most some combination of  health, education and life satisfaction.
• Men and women who have used the Index value basically the same things.
• The wealthier you are, the more likely you are to make your voice heard in elections, but not by a huge margin.
• Men work more in the labour market and make more money than women, but women are better in other areas, they live longer, are better educated and in most places they are also happier.
• Inequality isn’t just about money, it affects other topics in Your Better Life Index."

BTW, if you have an interest in these issues, then the Freedom and Flourishing blog that Winton Bates writes should be on your reading list.

 

© 2012, David E. Giles

Log Transformations & Forecasting

I enjoyed reading the lead article in the latest issue of Empirical Economics, by Helmut Lütkepohl and Fang Xu. It assesses the quality of forecasts obtained from an ARIMA model that is estimated using the levels of the data in question, as opposed to forecasts that are generated from a model estimated from the logarithms of the data.

Estimating & Simulating an SEM

We all know that structural simultaneous equations models (SEM’s) played a key role in the historical development of Econometrics as a discipline. An understanding of these models and the associated estimators is an important part of our training, whether we use these models or not in our day-to-day work. The issues that they raise have helped shape much of our current econometric tool-kit.

I've posted on this topic before, but here I'm going to look at the results of applying various SEM estimators using the EViews econometrics package. In particular, I'll use a simple well-known structural model to illustrate the estimates that are obtained when different “limited information” and “full information” estimators are used.

Then, I'll take a look at using an estimated SEM for the purposes of simulating the effect of a policy shock.

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