Social Econ Blog

Thursday, we will be reviewing the basic statistical and empirical tools that we will rely on throughout the course. In order to prepare, please read this and the 970_papermanual from here. This first is a basic review of the use of statistics from the BBC. The second is a document that I wrote for this course entitled "My First Economics Paper: A primer on writing empirical papers in economics." This document includes a lot of technical detail on using stata, etc., you should feel free to skim through these parts at this point. I will force you to use them later to complete the stata parts of the empirical exercise. Be sure to read sections 1, 2, and the review of regressions in section 6.

For Thursday's email assignment (sent to me by 11AM on Thursday)

In class Tuesday, we discussed the fact that there a very large number of economics concentrators at Harvard. We discussed a variety of hypotheses relating to this. E.g., economics is more valuable on the job market(with sub hypotheses associated with signaling and human capital (skill) investment), or economics is easier and has thus lower costs. Pick one of these stories (or another one that you have thought about pertaining to concentration) and briefly discuss how you might go about gathering evidience to support your argument (i.e., test your hypothesis).

One way to try this is to focus on the simple question if my story is true, then we should observe X.

Also, don't feel that you have limit your thinking to data that actually exists. Feel free to imagine that you can get whatever data you want.