Statistics

Course goals

Learning objectives 
At the end of the course the student is able to:

• Understand and apply fundamentals of statistics;
• Use statistics to specify, analyze and quantify (the relationship between) economic variables;
• Formalize and conduct statistical tests of hypotheses;
• Describe and solve statistical problems in a clear and systematic way;
• Interpret relationships between (economic) variables obtained from regression analysis;
• Can communicate, also in words, about a statistical analysis.

Content

Statistics is an essential course for economists. An economist analyses and quantifies relationships between economic variables; for instance, the relationship between prices and quantities or between inflation and unemployment. In doing so, an economist makes use of economic theory to formulate relationships and hypotheses, and statistics to quantify relationships between economic variables and to test hypotheses.

The course Statistics includes the following topics: descriptive statistics, probability theory, estimation of parameters and hypothesis testing, mathematical expectations and regression analysis.

Academic skills
This course focuses on the following academic skills:

Analytical skills

• ​Problem solving (identifying the problem, devising a path towards the solution, following this path, verifying the outcome) for specific questions. 

Information processing

• Being able to work with data software, such as Excel, Stata and R.

Format 
Pre-recorded lectures / knowledge clips. Two tutorials per week of two hours each.  
 
Repeaters course
Repeaters are not assigned to regular tutorials and have no effort requirement. They have one revision tutorial before the midtem exam and one before the endterm exam.

Effort requirements 
The effort requirement consists of participation in at least 10 tutorials.

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not reusable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.