Practical Econometrics – serie

This book provides an accessible guide to price index and hedonic techniques, with a focus on how to best apply these techniques and interpret the resulting measures. One goal of this book is to provide first-hand experience at constructing these measures, with guidance on practical issues such as what the ideal data would look like and how best to construct these measures when the data are less than ideal. A related objective is to fill the wide gulf between the necessarily simplistic elementary treatments in textbooks and the very complex discussions found in the theoretical and empirical measurement literature. Here, the theoretical results are summarized in an intuitive way and their numerical importance is illustrated using data and results from existing studies. Finally, while the aim of much of the existing literature is to better understand official price indexes like the Consumer Price Index, the emphasis here is more practical: to provide the needed tools for individuals to apply these techniques on their own. As new datasets become increasingly accessible, tools like these will be needed to obtain summary price measures. Indeed, these techniques have been applied for years in antitrust cases that involve pricing, where economic experts typically have access to large, granular datasets.

The purpose of this book is to bring together, for the first time, a description and examples of the main methods used in microsimulation modelling used in the field of income distribution analysis. It is structured to develop and use the different types of models used in the field, with a focus on household targeted policy. The book aims to provide a greater degree of codified knowledge by providing a practical guide to developing and using microsimulation models. At present, the training of researchers and analysts that use and develop microsimulation modelling is done on a relatively ad hoc basis through occasional training programmes and lecture series, built around lecture notes. Practical Microsimulation Modelling enables a more formalised and organised approach. Each chapter addresses a separate modelling approach in a similar consistent way, describing in a practical way the key methodological skills for each approach.

Providing a practical introduction to state space methods as applied to unobserved components time series models, also known as structural time series models, this book introduces time series analysis using state space methodology to readers who are neither familiar with time series analysis, nor with state space methods. The only background required in order to understand the material presented in the book is a basic knowledge of classical linear regression models, of which a brief review is provided to refresh the reader's knowledge. Also, a few sections assume familiarity with matrix algebra, however, these sections may be skipped without losing the flow of the exposition. The book offers a step by step approach to the analysis of the salient features in time series such as the trend, seasonal, and irregular components. Practical problems such as forecasting and missing values are treated in some detail. This useful book will appeal to practitioners and researchers who use time series on a daily basis in areas such as the social sciences, quantitative history, biology and medicine. It also serves as an accompanying textbook for a basic time series course in econometrics and statistics, typically at an advanced undergraduate level or graduate level.

This book provides an accessible presentation of the standard statistical techniques used by labour economists. It emphasises both the input and the output of empirical analysis and covers five major topics concerning econometric methods used in labour economics: regression and related methods, choice modelling, selectivity issues, duration analysis, and policy evaluation techniques. Each of these is presented in terms of model specification, possible estimation problems, diagnostic checking, and interpretation of the output. It aims to provide guidance to practitioners on how to use the techniques and how to make sense of the results that are produced. It covers methods that are considered to be 'standard' tools in labour economics, but which are often given only a brief and highly technical treatment in econometrics textbooks. It will be a useful reference for postgraduates and advanced undergraduates, researchers embarking on empirical labour market analysis, and for more experienced economists wishing to apply these techniques for the first time.