Economics 551 - B : ECONOMETRIC METHODS

The first issue is whether one ought to use of Bayesian or Classical methods of inference. I will briefly cover Bayesian methods which have been revitalized given recent developments in monte carlo simulation and numerical integration. Nevertheless, Bayesian methods are still computationally burdensome and heavily linked to particular parametric functional forms, limiting their applicability to semiand nonparametric problems (discussed further below). The primary focus of this course is on classical statistical inference using large-sample asymptotics to derive approximate sampling distributions of various estimators.