I Term September - December

• Introduction to econometrics (Prof. Francesco F. Russo)

The course is an introduction to the classical statistical inference theory.

The first half of the course is devoted to Probability theory. Topics include: Elements of set theory. Axiomatic definition of probability. Calculus of probability. Conditional probabaility and Bayes Theorem. Discrete and continuous random variables. Common Family of distributions, Hierarchies and Mixtures. Bivariate Random variables. Transformations and Convolution Integral.

The second part of the course is devoted to Inference. Topics include: Sampling and sampling distribution. Principles of data reduction (sufficiency, Likelihood). Point and interval estimation (methods to find estimators and properties of the estimators). Hypothesis testing. Asymptotic Theory. Linear regression models.

The very last lectures are devoted to an introduction to the use of Stata for applied economic research. 

  Bibliography:

• Casella, G. and Berger, R: "Statistical Inference", Duxbury press.
• Stock, J and Watson, M: "Introduction to Econometrics", Addison-Wesley.