EC 425/525, Spring 2019

Welcome to Economics 425/525: Econometrics III (Spring 2019) at the University of Oregon (taught by Dr. Ed Rubin).

Schedule

Lecture Monday and Wednesday 2:00pm–3:20pm, McKenzie Hall 240A

Lab Friday 12:00pm–12:50pm, Gerlinger Hall 302

Office hours

• Ed Rubin Monday 4:00pm–5:00pm and Thursday 9:00am–10:00am, PLC 519
• Jenni Putz Monday 4:00pm–5:00pm and Friday 9:30am–11:00am, PLC 523

Books

We will mainly use two books.

Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion (MHE)
by Angrist and Pischke
Your new best friend. Read it.

Microeconometrics (C&T)
by Cameron and Trivedi
Also very readable and accessible.

Runner up (the standard):

Econometric Analysis (Greene)
by Greene
Encyclopedic resource for all (most?) of the questions MHE does not answer.

Lecture slides

Note: The linked slides (below) are .html files that will only work properly if you are connected to the internet. If you're going off grid (camping + metrics?), grab the PDFs. You'll miss out on gifs and interactive plots, but the equations will actually show up. I've removed the within-slide (incremental) pauses in the (no pause) slides.

The content of the lectures mainly follows MHE and Michael Anderson—with additional inspiration from Max Auffhammer and many other sources.

Lecture 01: Research + R + You = 💖

1. An introduction to empirical research via applied econometrics.
2. R: Light introduction—objects, functions, and help.

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE preface + MHE chapter 1

Lecture 02: The Experimental Ideal

1. Neyman potential outcomes framework (Rubin causal model)
2. Selection bias and experimental variation in treatment
3. R: Object types/classes and package management.

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 2

Lecture 03: Why Regression?

1. What's the big deal about least-squares (population) regression?
2. What does the CEF tell us?
3. How does least-squares regression relate to the CEF?

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 3

Lecture 04: Inference and Simulation

1. How do we move from populations to samples?
2. What matters for drawing basic statistical inferences about the population?
3. How can we learn about inference from simulation?
4. How do we run (parallelized) simulations in R?

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 3

Lecture 05: Regression Stuff

1. Saturated models
2. When is regression causal?
3. The conditional-independence assumption

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: Still MHE chapter 3

Lecture 06: Controls

1. Omitted-variable bias
2. Good and bad controls

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: Still MHE chapter 3

Another note on the notes: I create the slides with xaringan in R. Thanks to Grant McDermott for encouraging me to make this switch.

Lecture 07: Matching

1. Matching estimators: Nearest neighbor and kernel
2. Propensity-score methods: Regression control, treatment-effect heterogeneity, blocking, weighting, doubly robust

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 3 + C&T section 25.4

Lecture 08: Instrument Variables

1. General research designs
2. Instrumental variables
3. Two-stage least squares
4. Heterogeneous treatment effects and the LATE

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 4 + C&T sections 4.8–4.9

Lecture 09: Regression Discontinuity

1. Sharp regression discontinuities
2. Fuzzy regression discontinuities
3. Graphical analyses

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 6 + C&T sections 25.6

Another note on the notes: I create the slides with xaringan in R. Thanks to Grant McDermott for encouraging me to make this switch.

Lecture 10: Inference: Clustering

1. General inference
2. Moulton
3. Cluster-robust standard errors

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 8

Lecture 11: Inference: Resampling and Randomization

1. Resampling
2. The bootstrap
3. Permutation tests (Fisher)
4. Randomization inference (Neyman-Pearson)

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Readings: MHE chapter 6 + C&T sections 25.6

Another note on the notes: I create the slides with xaringan in R. Thanks to Grant McDermott for encouraging me to make this switch.

Lab slides

Lab 01: R Intro/Review

1. Object types/classes/structures
2. Package management
3. Math and stat. in R
4. Indexing

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd
Solutions: .html | .pdf

Lab 02: Data in/and R

1. Data frames
2. Data work with dplyr

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd

Lab 03: RStudio + Data i/o with R

1. RStudio
2. Getting data into and out of R

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd

Lab 04: Regression in R

1. lm() and lm objects
2. estimatr and lm_robust()
3. Other regressions, e.g., glm()

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd

Lab 05: Plotting in R

1. Default plot() methods
2. ggplot2

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd

Lab 06: Simulation in R

1. General simulation strategies
2. Simulating IV in finite samples

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd

Lab 07: Miscellaneous R Tips and Tricks

1. The apply family
2. for() loops
3. Lists
4. Logical vectors and which()

Note formats: .html | .html (no pause) | .pdf | .pdf (no pause) | .Rmd

Problem sets

2–4 problem sets combining econometric theory and R.

Problem set 1
Due Sunday, 19 May 2019 by midnight
Solutions

Problem set 2
Due Wednesday, 29 May 2019 by midnight
Solutions

Project

Building a research project/proposal.

Step 1: Research question (causal relationship of interest) and motivation.
Should be between 2 sentences and 2 paragraphs.
Due 15 April 2019.

Step 2: Short proposal
Due 30 May 2019

Practice problems

1. Instrumental variables
2. Regression discontinuity

Exams

The exam

Resources

Metrics books

• Hayashi's Econometrics
• Kennedy
• Mastering 'Metrics (undergrad version of Mostly Harmless)
• Stock and Waston
• Wooldridge ("Baby")
• Wooldridge (Adult?)

R resources

• Grant McDermott's Data Science of Economists course
• DataCamp's Introduction to R
• R for Data Science
• Advanced R
• RStudio's listing of online resources

Metrics and R

• Section notes from a previous PhD-level class.
• Lecture notes from a previous undergrad class.