Course Materials

California State University, Fresno

This course introduces students to the basic principles of statistical data analysis in economics. Students learn how economic data are used with economic and statistical models as a basis for estimating key economic parameters, testing economic hypotheses and understanding economic outcomes.

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Union College

Econometrics uses data to analyze economic questions. The objective of this course is to familiarize students with basic methods of econometrics and with the mechanics of writing a research paper that uses these methods. We will learn how to describe and compare economic variables and how to examine relationships among them. This course is a key part of the economics major. It will enable students to understand quantitative analyses which are used in upper level courses, and to perform such analyses on their own.

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Smith College

I separate learning goals into goals with different verbs: know, understand, comprehend, analyze, synthesize, do, etc.

• Know the virtues and limitations of the rational actor model and its application to choice theory and the behavioral sciences.
• Understand the role of economics as a discipline in the behavioral sciences
• Ask meaningful questions with important potential answers
• Analyze data from experiments and surveys to answer questions relevant to the behavioral sciences
• Synthesize different ideas, theories and empirics within the behavioral sciences
• Design well conceived experiments and surveys to answer important questions
• Find ways to wrangle data and play around with computing to derive useful insights
• Recognize the benefits of teaching yourself to do new things.

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Clark University

An important part of a successful research project is documenting the process well enough that others can reproduce your results (it also makes it much easier for you to extend your own research at some future date). Students will follow the TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research) Protocol developed by Richard Ball and others at Haverford College (see http://projecttier.org for more background information). The documentation students prepare covers three stages of the research process: the original data source(s) accessed, the steps needed to develop the final analysis dataset(s), and the statistical analyses presented in the paper.

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Dickinson College

This course is a rigorous introduction to econometrics in which the tools of economic theory, mathematics, and statistical inference are applied to the analysis of economic data. We will study and apply multiple regression analysis to both cross-sectional and longitudinal (panel) data in order to familiarize students with the concepts of econometric modeling, estimation, prediction, and hypothesis testing. Students will conduct empirical research projects using Stata to enable students to understand and apply the conventions of empirical research in economics, including: technical writing, reviewing existing literature, data collection and organization, and file management for complete transparency and reproducibility. Throughout the semester students will:

• Learn the econometric methodology, including how to construct econometric models, estimate relevant economic parameters, predict economic outcomes, and test economic hypotheses using quantitative data.
• Do regression analysis. They will be able to choose a topic conducive to regression analysis, specify a regression equation, collect data, run descriptive statistics, run regressions, interpret and evaluate the results, and demonstrate the necessary components of a well-written empirical research paper and the economics discipline formatting and style conventions.
• Learn the basic assumptions of the classical linear regression model and identify and correct (if possible) any violations of these assumptions, such as serial correlation and heteroskedasticity.
• Evaluate regression results, determining whether the regression coefficients have the expected sign and magnitude, whether the regression coefficients are statistically significant, whether the equation includes irrelevant variables or omits theoretically relevant variables, and whether the goodness of fit of the equation appears adequate.
• Demonstrate an understanding of Stata syntax, data management skills, and best coding and documentation practices for reproducibility.
• Demonstrate the ability to place a research question in the context of existing scholarly discourse through an effective literature review.

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Union College

This is the first year Tomas has taught a new course entitled Business Analytics. The key learning objective is for students to be able to manipulate and analyze business data. The course is very hands-on with students programming in R Markdown from the first day. The emphasis is on data manipulation: students need to load in data, summarize, reshape, merge and append the data in multiple ways to get insights. In this course students realize that data preparation and manipulation is 90% of the work of an empirical researcher or an analyst. Running a regression or a sophisticated algorithm is the last and fairly straightforward step. The value of any analysis lies mostly in the quality and organization of the data. Using R Markdown forces students to integrate data manipulation and analysis with text. Their final project is always reproducible because it is a knitted R Markdown document. Even if they don't end up using R Markdown in the future (e.g. their thesis), the course gives them programming skills that are essential to reproducible research.

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Smith College

A majority of the world’s population lives on less than $2.50/day. Health status, educational attainment, government quality, and many other indicators are substantially lower in developing countries than in developed countries. Why are so many people so poor and what stop them from catching up? What strategies help alleviate poverty? What policies or institutions cause economies to grow and develop? We begin the class by understanding how to define and measure development, studying income, poverty, inequality, human development and health. We proceed to look at economic theories of growth as a tool to understand how agriculture, institutions and transformation have affected and conTnue to affect developing countries. Toward the end of the course we complicate our understanding of development by looking at the role of market failures and externalities, globalization and world trade, and credit and risk.

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Smith College

There are many approaches to development economics. First, there are many attempts to explain international differences in economic development – the ‘macro’ development problem. Second, there are many differences between the ways in which individuals, firms and states can respond to the challenges of development – the ‘micro’ development problem. The microeconomics of development informs the macroeconomics of development. From micro work we may gain insight into the specific individual-, family-, village- and firm-level institutions and constraints that shape decisions. As we try to understand how micro-level results permeate through an economy, that is, we try to understand the general equilibrium effects of a policy, so may we gain insight into macrolevel differences. Micro and macro tie together closely.

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Carleton College

These labs were developed as part of ECON 395: Advanced Topics in the Economics of Housing. This course is typically taken during the fall term by senior economics majors at Carleton College as part one of the two term senior Comprehensive Exercise. During the senior seminar 10-15 students read and discuss primary literature related to the seminar topic and ultimately propose an individual empirical research project to be completed in the subsequent term.

The primary goal of the seminar is to help students write a research prospectus containing:

• a tractible research question,
• a description of an appropriate and accessible dataset,
• a proposed analysis methodology and identification strategy,
• and, a knowledge of how the proposed work fits within the scholarly literature.

This is the first course in the major in which Econometrics is a prerequisite. Therefore, this is typically the first course for which students can apply their econometric tools to the task of reading primary literature. As such, they often struggle understanding the myriad steps involved “behind the scenes” that are necessary to construct the dataset described in the paper (for instance, merging datasets from multiple sources). They commonly struggle to understand what is feasible as they propose their own projects and often find themselves in more challenging circumstances than expected.

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Union College

All economics majors at Union College must write a senior thesis. Most theses use data and regression analysis, though theses that are more narrative or include a business plan are not uncommon. It has always been common practice for faculty to require submission of data and programs with thesis. More and more students use Stata or R to manipulate and analyze their data. However, some students use the software interactively (point and click), and even if they write programs they are rarely organized in a fashion that promotes reproducibility. At the beginning of this year, Tomas held a workshop for senior thesis students to explain the importance of reproducibility and organization of documents and programs along the the lines of TIER protocol.

The first crop of thesis students that were exposed to the TIER protocol just finished. It remains to be seen how many theses are reproducible. Tomas' own students followed the protocol but ran into a number of challenges. For example, one student used confidential data and thus is not able to post the data; another student used very large data and is still working on organizing all of his programs and data. Tomas plans to survey his colleagues on the extent to which their advisees' theses are reproducible. The first year of using the TIER protocol for senior thesis was harder than anticipated. This is largely because the students' priority is to get results rather than documenting and organizing the way they got to the results.

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Colgate University

Course Objectives and Structure:This course is your capstone course in the economics curriculum. The focus is on producing a research paper of publication quality. To accomplish this, you should be able to:

• state and motivate a cogent research question
• produce a credible literature review
• exhibit knowledge of basic economic theory as it relates to environmental and natural resource issues
• exhibit competence of statistical and econometric techniques if the work is of the empirical/statistical type
• produce clear, well reasoned arguments with a high standard of writing skill.
• provide all documentation as required by the TIER protocol of Ball and Medeiros (2012)

A seminar course is very different in tone and structure from other instructional courses in the curriculum. A seminar is a collaborative learning effort by all those involved. It is not the professor teaching the students, but rather the professor and students all learning together from each other. This means that there is far more responsibility on the part of the students to contribute to each other’s learning.Research project:

• You are required to write an independent research paper examining an aspect of a topic in environmental, resource, or ecological economics. Specific details will be forthcoming, but you should begin examining topics immediately!
• The research project could be (1) applied, empirical and statistical; (2) theoretical. It must be of academic interest, and ideally should be of practical interest (at least to someone).
• I expect the paper to be professionally written and in an economics journal style. Details of this will be discussed.
• We will adhere to the criterion that the paper must be fully documented so that its results can be fully replicated by a reader. This means that all data, code, and metadata must be supplied following the TIER protocol described in Ball and Medeiros (2012) which we will discuss in class.
• In the last few weeks of class, each of you will present your findings to the class.

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Haverford College

This is an introductory course in applied statistics that serves as a pre-requisite for an econometrics course that all economics majors are required to take. The course consists of three hours or class per week, plus a weekly two-hour computer lab devoted to an original research project. Working in small groups, students choose a topic; review the relevant literature; find appropriate statistical data; clean and organize the data; and conduct analyses to see what they can learn about the questions they set out to investigate. At the end of the semester they present their study and findings in a complete research paper, accompanied by comprehensive replication documentation that meets the specifications of the TIER Protocol.

This research project is carried out in several installments: a pre-proposal, a full proposal, a data report, and the final paper. Instructions for each of these installments, including detailed instructions for the replication documentation, are provided in the course materials available for download below.

A course syllabus is also included in the materials available for download.

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Colgate University

This applied econometrics course is a requirement for all economics majors at Colgate University. Students in this section of the course were required to write an original empirical research paper, with complete replication documentation constructed according to the guidelines of the TIER Protocol.

Detailed instructions for the research paper can be found in the document available for download below.

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Williams College

For this project, students use the Project TIER Research Protocol. This protocol, developed at Haverford College, improves transparency, replicability, and self-discipline in the research process. The final paper is submitted with the raw data files (in the original file format and converted to Stata or other format) and all do files necessary to implement the analysis in the project. The students' do files are archived and made available to anyone who wishes to replicate the results.

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Williams College

The purpose of the group empirical project is to allow students to practice the tools they learn in class, and to expose them to the challenges and joys of empirical research. In groups of 1-3 people, they write a 15-page empirical paper on a topic of their choice. They give a 10-15 minute presentation to the class at the end of the semester explaining their project and highlighting their findings. They then submit their paper, raw data, and Stata programs, as described by a research protocol.

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