Fellow agricultural and applied economist Matt Bogard had a very nice post last weekend discussing my own post last month on the cookbook approach to econometrics:
It is the gap between theory and practice [of econometrics] that has given me a ton of grief in the last few years. After spending hours and hours in graduate school working through tons of theorems and proofs to basically restate everything I learned as an undergraduate in a more rigorous tone, I found that when it came to actually doing econometrics I wasn’t much the better, or sometimes wondered if maybe I even regressed. [Note: Ha! – MFB.] At every corner was a different challenge that seemed at odds with everything I learned in grad school. Doing econometrics felt like running in water. As Peter Kennedy states in the applied econometrics chapter of his popular A Guide to Econometrics, “econometrics is much easier without data.” As Angrist and Pischke state: “if applied econometrics were easy theorists would do it.”
!["Bro, this elixir will guarantee that my predicted values are not outside of [0,1]."](https://marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Longhi.jpg)
