Marc F. Bellemare Posts

(Update: As far as I can tell from the link below, the course is now full. It remains possible, however, to put your name on the waiting list if you are interested. I suspect some people will be moved from the waiting list to the course eventually.)

I will be co-teaching a course titled Advanced Econometrics: Causal Inference with Observational Data at the University of Copenhagen from May 14-18, 2018 with my colleague Arne Henningsen. Though the link lists Arne as the instructor, I will be teaching the lecture part of the course, and Arne, who will be teaching the lab part of the course, writes:

[T]he website states that I am the “lecturer” of this course. I asked our administration to change it to you or to both of us. However, they cannot change this, because only staff at our University can be responsible for our courses and, thus, can be mentioned as lecturers of our courses. A complete list of lecturers (including you) is given further down of the course website.

If you are interested in taking the course, enrollment is open to students outside of the University of Copenhagen, and as of writing, registration is about $165, which is a bargain (though if you register, you are obviously responsible for your travel and accommodation costs, but I hear Copenhagen is lovely in May).

Here is the course description:

Last Friday, Chris Goodman tweeted about the “conclusion formula” I wrote a few years ago, about how to write the conclusion of a standard paper in economics. Rob Greer then responded as follows:

Perfect. Now we just need a formula for the middle bits and we are done.

— Rob Greer (@robgreer1) January 12, 2018

Rob most likely meant to joke, but there actually is such a thing as a formula for the so-called “middle bits”–at least for the kind of paper I usually write.

Let’s look into the outline of the typical paper. When I write a new paper, the first thing I do in LaTex is to create the following sections:

1. Introduction
2. Theoretical Framework
3. Empirical Framework
4. Data and Descriptive Statistics
5. Results and Discussion
6. Conclusion

Per Wikipedia, recall that the Durbin-Wu-Hausman test (hereafter the Hausman test)

evaluates the consistency of an estimator when compared to an alternative, less efficient estimator which is already known to be consistent.

One common way in which the Hausman test is used is to compare OLS with 2SLS–that is, to perform a test of the null of exogeneity. This tests consists in estimating an OLS specification, estimating a 2SLS specification of the same equation, and then in comparing whether the two parameter vectors are statistically the same. If you fail to reject the null of exogeneity, OLS is to be preferred. If you reject the null, then 2SLS is to be preferred.