Readings

1. Sinning in the Basement:  What are the rules?  Ten Commandments of applied econometrics.  Peter Kennedy.  Journal of Economic Surveys, 2002.
2. Oh No! I Got the Wrong Sign! What Should I Do?  Peter Kennedy.  Journal of Economic Education, (1) 2005. Students may download this copy, but do not distribute it further.  

Software

Stata Resources

• Stata in the College of Business. Stata is available on all computers served by the College of Business servers.  This includes the two labs (B-2 Business Building and 104 Gundersen), the Trading Floor, and Bus 344 and elsewhere.
• The Stata Website
•  Resources for learning Stata
•  Loading web based data into STATA. Unfortuantely, this only works from Internet Explorer (or other web browsers that support Microsoft's .mht format) at this time.
• Introduction to Stata. Also, UCLA's Stata resources page.
• Some of you have asked me, "Why aren't we using SPSS?" Although SPSS is particularly adept at analysis of variance, it is not as well suited for the robust kinds of analyses that I think you should be using. Hence, I picked STATA, which is relatively good at this sort of thing and still offers a reasonably powerful engine for doing the things that SPSS does. Version 9 of STATA made some significant strides in this area. For a comparison of SAS, SPSS, and STATA (older version) see UCLA's software comparison.
•  The Stata Starter kit from UCLA. This is particularly valuable for those learning to use Stata. There are a number of online tutorials with notes that are available. To get used to using Stata, I suggest looking at the class notes with movies found here.
• Coming Soon:  Obtaining Stata.    

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Gretl Resources

• Gretl homepage. Gretl. The MS Windows executable that will install Gretl onto your Windows computer is Here. Also listed are some datasets that you may wish to install.
• Introduction to Econometrics using Gretl. This is a book that is being prepared for use with another textbook. It gives you a pretty good introduction to using Gretl. Gretl Book. Check back regularly because this book is in production and I expect to update it frequently early in the semester.
• Here is a link to the gretl datasets for the second edition of Stock and Watson: Stock and Watson, 2nd. Basically, you can click on it to install it.  Make sure you install it to the right directory, otherwise gretl won't be able to find it.
• Also, you can consult my gretl page that will contain the links listed above and a few othters.

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Data

• The data sets from Stock and Watsons site can be found here. 

1. caschool.dta
2. fatality.dta
3. macro_2e.dta
4. College Distance and its description.
5. Cigarette Data
6. Growth and its description.
7. CPS04.dta
8. cps1.dta

• The gretl data sets can be found here.
• The Wage Data from Jeffrey Wooldridge
• STATA Dataset
• gretl Dataset
• The Baseball data from Wooldrige.
• The JC/University data from Wooldrige.

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Notes

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Homework  and Solutions

1. Introduction to Stata.  First, go to the UCLA website and watch the first three Stata movies (http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/notes/).   It's a good idea to work along with these.  These are excellent tutorials on using Stata.   The first two modules cover the interface, data entry, and some basic data exploration commands.  
2. Complete the following assignment using either gretl or Stata.  I have also written a short introduction to using Stata that covers all of the stuff you'd need to know to do this.  Don't hesitate to ask me questions.  This is designed for you to get up to speed with the software. Do not turn this assignment in to me.  Here is my version.
   
3. Exercise 2.6.  Solution.
   
4. Here is the data set in 3 different formats.  Using Excel and Stata, import each into Stata and verify that each is imported correctly.  Here are a few more notes from the Stata website.
• Comma Separated Values.  hs0.csv
• Excel spreadsheet hs0.xlsx
• ASCII (unformatted text)  hs0.txt
5. Exercises 2.10-2.12 using Stata.  I'll show you how to use the Stata functions in class.  
6. Empirical Exercise E4.4 in Stock and Watson.   This is the one on page 138-139 where you run a regression of growth on tradeshare.

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