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Real Stats provides an engaging and practical introduction to econometrics for upper level undergraduates and first year graduate students in political science, public policy, law, and economics.
Many students expect statistics to be hard, boring, and irrelevant. Experienced instructors know that overcoming these views is key to jumpstarting student engagement, a necessary first step in learning the material and developing a passion that can carry students on to serious research. Written in a chatty, conversational style, Real Stats begins by inviting students to see how econometric tools can help answer important and interesting questions such as why people vote, how to organize our health care system, which government programs work best, and whether or not tall people get higher wages.
Real Stats achieves student engagement while offering serious statistical training. The book covers the modern statistical toolkit, ranging from OLS to field experiments, panel data analysis, instrumental variables, probit and logit models. The book ties together these topics under the twin themes of fighting endogeneity and accounting for uncertainty in estimates.
Real Stats is built to work in multiple course contexts. Instructors teaching a first semester course can start from scratch on page 1 and find everything they need to get students to a mature understanding of regression. Political science or public policy instructors teaching a second semester course for undergraduate or graduate students can use the early parts of the book as a review and focus on modern identification strategies inherent in panel models, instrumental variables approaches, field experiments and regression-discontinuity designs. Economics instructors teaching a traditional econometrics course for economics and business majors will find thorough coverage of the most frequently used methods of econometric analysis and a diverse array of examples and case studies applicable to public policy and political science as well as economics. Instructors teaching more mathematical classes can use this as a supplement that explains intuition and connects the methods to real-world applications.
