INTRODUCTION
Econometrics is all about using data. It refers to the quantitative application involving statistical and mathematical models. The models rely on data to extend theories or tests. In addition, the theories and presented postulations in economics, and for estimating future trends from historical data.
Econometrics is related to real-world data to statistical trials. This allows business executives to compare and project the results against the theory or theories that are being examined. Depending on if you are willing to test a previously explained theory.
Business managers are able to formulate data. Econometrics allows business managers to develop a new hypothesis based on those observations. Econometrics can be expanded into two more categories: theoretical and applied.
Those who are normally employed in this practice are commonly known as econometricians.
BREAKING DOWN ‘Econometrics’
Econometrics makes data applicable. Business managers use statistical methods in order to test or formulate an economic theory. These methods are contingent on statistical inferences to compute and study economic theories.
Business executives leverage tools such as frequency distributions, probability, and probability distributions, simultaneous equations models, correlation analysis, simple, statistical inference, multiple regression analysis, and time-series methods.
Econometrics was forged by Lawrence Klein, Ragnar Frisch, and Simon Kuznets. All three were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1971 for their contributions. Today, econometrics is applied regularly among academics as well as practitioners such as Wall Street traders and analysts.
An example of the function of econometrics is to revise the income effect by applying visible data. An economist may project that as a person inflates his income, his spending will also inflate. If the data display that such an alliance is pertinent, a regression analysis can then be administered to comprehend the potency of the relationship between income and expenditure and whether or not that association is statistically important – that is, it appears to be dubious that it is due to chance alone.
THE METHODOLOGY OF ECONOMETRICS
The first step to econometric methodology is to obtain and analyze a set of data and define a specific hypothesis that explains the nature and shape of the set. This data may be, for example, the historical prices for a stock index, observations collected from a survey of consumer finances, or unemployment and inflation rates in different countries.
If you are interested in the relationship between the annual price change of the S&P 500 and the unemployment rate, you’d collect both sets of data. Here, you want to test the idea that higher unemployment leads to lower stock market prices. The stock market price is, therefore, your dependent variable and the unemployment rate is the independent or explanatory variable.
The most ordinary association is linear, meaning that any change in the descriptive erratic will have a positive connection with the reliant erratic, in which case an easy failure model is often used to discover this relationship, which amounts to producing the best fit line between the two sets of data and then testing to see how far each data point is, on average, from that line.
Note that you can have several descriptive variables in your scrutiny, for example, changes to GDP and inflation in addition to unemployment in detailing stock market prices. When more than one descriptive variable is used, it is referred to as many linear regressions – a model that is the most commonly old tool in econometrics.
Several diverse regression models are real that are optimized depending on the scenery of the data being analyzed and the type of question being asked. The most familiar instance is the ordinary least-squares ( OLS ) regression, which can be conducted on several types of cross-sectional or time-series data.
If you’re involved in a binary (yes-no) outcome – for example, how probable you are to be fired from a job (yes, you get fired, or no, you do not) based on your output – you can use logistic regression or a probit model.
Today, there are hundreds of models that an econometrician has at his disposal.
Econometrics is now conducted by means of statistical study software packages intended for these purposes, such as STATA, SPSS, or R.
These software packages can also easily check for the statistical implication to offer support that the experiential results shaped by these models are not only the consequence of chance. R-squared, t-tests, p-values, and null-hypothesis hard are all methods applicable by econometricians to assess the validity of their model results.
SUMMARY
Econometrics is sometimes agreed upon for relying too greatly on the understanding of data without linking it to recognized economic theory. It is vital that the findings exposed in the data are able to be sufficiently explained by a theory, even if that means increasing your own theory of the original processes.
Regression analysis also does not prove causation, and just because two data sets show a relationship, it may be spurious: for example, drowning deaths in swimming pools boost with GDP. Does a rising economy cause people to drown? Of course, not, but perhaps more people purchase pools when the economy is thriving.
References:
1. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/12/basics.htm
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics
Last Updated on January 23, 2022 by
Magalie D. is a Diploma holder in Public Administration & Management from McGill University of Canada. She shares management tips here in MGTBlog when she has nothing to do and gets some free time after working in a multinational company at Toronto.
