Introductory Econometrics: Using Monte Carlo Simulation with Microsoft Excel

As an academic with little background in economics who constantly struggled with advanced techniques, over the years I have tried several econometrics textbooks. Every book has its strengths, but of all books I have been exposed to, I thought this one had the clearest exposition. Concepts are explained well, and the Monte Carlo approach helps tremendously in grasping the underpinning concepts. Things I liked about this book in general:* It clearly distinguishes between descriptive and inferential statistics - between describing and summarizing data, and drawing inferences from that data.* Use of Excel sheets to try things out and "see" many things for yourself (for example, see how the least squares achieves best fit to the data).* It uses real data on economic indicators, such as data on labor markets.* It minimizes use of matrix algebra or calculus. Mathematical proofs etc. are pushed into appendices at the end of chapters, which can be skipped without loss of continuity.Things I did not like:* You have to wait until Chapter 10 in order to get to statistical inference. The first 200 pages is all about summarizing and interpreting patterns in data.* The book requires you to constantly switch between Excel sheets and the book itself. As a result, every chapter takes longer to finish. Sometimes you have to work on more than one worksheet within a chapter, which adds to this difficulty.* Excel is not a statistics program and can be cumbersome. Moreover, if the student is to take more advanced courses, Excel will not be enough for him/her.I think overall the pros far outweigh the cons. I would suggest this book to students who want to grasp the basics well before moving on to more advanced courses; to graduate students outside economics who want to get a good understanding of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and its assumptions, and to practitioners who want to have a working knowledge of OLS and its limitations. The book would be too introductory for graduate economics students in my opinion. But if you are lost in your `standard' econometrics textbook as an undergraduate, this book may save you. Finally, as with any other textbook, I would pair this book with "A Guide to Econometrics" by Kennedy, which is an excellent supplement.

This book is alright if you looking at using excel for any predictive modeling using the Monte Carlo Method. As the title suggests it is geared toward business and economic simulations, but the sample principles apply to building simulations for engineering, design, or mathematical applications. Excel seems to be a universal arena people want to use for this purpose, This book gives a decent back ground of the theory but is really good for all the sample problems you can work and the answers to selected problems are in the back of the book. I have added it to my reference shelf at work.

Where is the application??The author uses very little, if any, examples of applying econometrics to financial topics. The book is strewn with Larry Bird free-throw stats and SAT scores, height weight distributions and skiing training! I was expecting daily returns on the S&P 500.I'm giving 2 stars because the CD included has some useful things, although the VB code is very amateurish.

This is a very thorough book on how a non-statistician can perform econometrics. The way the book was written, surely you can maximize the capabilities of Excel and deeply understand the logic behind statistical analyses.

Introductory Econometrics: Using Monte Carlo Simulation with Microsoft Excel This book is a waste of time and money. It is basically a book on statistics. Verbose but not much teaching. 90% of it I (as well as most people who have studied basic statistics) already know and do not need it. The other 10% I don't know, it does not teach me except by giving me a few button to press.

A

A very good text for learning about statistical techniques used in econometrics. Very detailed instructions, but easy to follow. I highly recommend the textbook.

I'm about 90 percent of the way through the text and I could only echo virtually everything the others have said. There are a lot of econometrics texts, some keyed to specific estimating packages. If you have enough self-discipline and motivation, you can get the basics, and for that matter, sometimes a little more. In quite a few fields--mine is one of them (economic history), you're not going to be doing Star Wars with 17th century data, or you shouldn't be. But I've always been left with some head scratching, particularly at more advanced procedures involving time series. You don't really get that in this text, but you get pretty much everything else--and you also get the intuition. Nothing like running a few thousand trials of an exercise to really understand what a sampling distribution is, or to understand what (more or less) randomness means, and that's the strength of this text. You get a computer, you sit down, you follow the examples, and then you repeat stuff on your own. Until you see it. Even if you know the basics pretty well, you'll learn things from this text (like what a chi-squared distribution really is) that you just won't get elsewhere. And you'll see why.There are some problems, which is why I don't give the book five stars. There are some bugs in the CD ROM and going to the book's website will only fix them some of the time. The DDV model add-ins don't seem to work at all, which renders the chapter on Logit and Probit models a lot less useful than it would otherwise ber. Excel is really clumsy, and the newer versions have got too many database-like features for all the people who misuse Excel that way. Which has made the interface a mess. In the text there seems to be a big error in the software running autoregressive models--cause there ain't no serial correlation in the Monte Carlo simulation (p.568 and ff) But you get enough confidence in what you're doing to sniff these things out, and eventually, you realize something is awry. Which gets indirectly confirmed in the text when the autocorrelation generator gets set to zero as an example. Voila. What you've been seeing and saying--which suggests you finally understand the stuff at some basic level. So go ahead and buy this book, especially if you have an uncertain grasp of fundamentals. You'll get them here in an intelligible way. I plan to use this with quant challenged students, because they'll see that there really isn't a lot of mystery to basic econometrics. I'll leave the advanced stuff to people who know what they're doing.

Application orienred

I bought this book on a recommendation from a colleague while working on some property investment models, It is a refreshing change to read a book that takes such an applied approach to the subject matter. If you are someone like me who focuses on application rather than theory and likes to learn by doing, this book is the one for you.