Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ADMINISTRATIVE
INSTRUCTOR
Professor John Eric Humphries (john.humphries@yale.edu)
Office: 37 Hillhouse, Room 32.
Office Hour: Wednesdays 2pm-3pm and by appointment.
TEACHING FELLOWS
• Kritika Narula (kritika.narula@yale.edu)
Sections: Friday, 2:30 pm WLH 114 and 3:30 pm WLH 113,
Office hours: Tuesdays 7:00pm-9:00pm in Bass Library Rm L34A or Bass Cafe
• Eduardo Pinheiro Fraga (eduardo.fraga@yale.edu)
Sections: Friday, 10:30 am and 11:35 am, WLH 113
Office hours: Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm in Bass Library Rm L30A
• Soumitra Shukla (soumitra.shukla@yale.edu)
Sections: Thursday, 7:00 pm and 8:00 pm, WLH 114
Office hours: Wednesdays 4:00pm-6:00pm in Bass Library Rm L34A
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
WEBSITE
On Canvas at: https://yale.instructure.com/courses/34777
This course will teach you how to judge quantitative information and how to use data to
answer quantitative questions, with a focus on questions in the social sciences. We will
cover three areas:
1. Probability, the study of uncertainty, such as the uncertainty faced by investors,
insurers, and people in everyday life.
2. Statistics, the science of analyzing and interpreting data, such as what a marketing
department might know about past consumer purchases.
3. Linear regression, a statistical method used to estimate links between two or more
variables. For example, how does setting a minimum wage affect employment and
earnings?
The prerequisites for this course are introductory microeconomics and familiarity with single
variable calculus. This course fulfills the econometrics requirement for the economics major.
In most econometrics classes, mathematical methods are introduced and then applied to a
few examples. This class turns that around. We will focus on substantive questions first,
and then introduce mathematical methods that will help us answer them. By the end of
the class, you will have acquired several concrete skills. Specifically, you will:
1. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of different methods.
2. Be able to choose appropriate methods to answer real-world questions.
3. Understand the math behind methods like linear regression and hypothesis testing.
4. Understand the intuition behind these methods.
5. Be able to apply these methods to analyze real data with a powerful statistical
analysis package (R)
The methodology covered in this course is broadly applicable throughout the social sci-
ences, and numerous applications will be discussed, though we will focus on substantive
applications in economics, particularly in the following areas:
1. Environmental/Natural Resource Economics
2. Intergenerational Mobility
3. Discrimination (loans, job market, police force)
4. Finance – Asset diversification, CAPM
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
GRADES
I reserve the right to change this breakdown if it becomes necessary. Your grade will be
based on the following components:
1. Online Quizzes (15%)
You will have four short on-line quizzes, two before the midterm and two after. The quizzes
are open book/open notes, but you cannot collaborate with other students on the quizzes
or discuss the quizzes with other students until after their solutions are posted. The lowest
quiz score will be dropped.
Quizzes will be posted on Tuesdays after class during the weeks where there is not a
homework due or the midterm. Quizes will remain live for 48 hour once posted and will
not include content from the class on the day the quiz is due.
• posted 01/30/18, due 02/01/18
• posted 02/13/18, due 02/15/18
• posted 04/03/18, due 04/05/18
• posted 04/17/18, due 04/19/18
5. Participation (5%)
Participation will be based on attendance, engagement in class, coming to office hours, or
asking and answering questions on Piazza. Students can access Piazza from the coure’s
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
canvas page (asking anonymous questions on Piazza does not count for participation).
LECTURES
Lectures will be interactive. Lecture slides will be posted on the course webpage, but are
not designed as a substitute for attending lecture. If you cannot attend a particular lecture,
please augment the lecture slides with the notes from a student who did attend the lecture.
I highly encourage students to not use laptops, phones, and tablets during class. If
students choose to use laptops or tablets to take notes, they may not use them to access
non-course-related websites, Apps, or email during class. The teaching assistants will take
note of students who are misusing technology during class (i.e., on facebook, on NYT,
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
or on their phones) and students who persistently misuse technology will not receive full
participation credit for the course.
SECTIONS/LABS
Discussion sections in this class may be quite different from what you are used to as your
TF’s will not be summarizing the week’s lectures or going over problems in front of the
class. Instead, each week you will be using the methods you learned in lecture to analyze
real data and answer real research questions. The sections will be designed to help you
with your problem sets, with some sections directly helping you with a problem set and
other sections not directly helping with a problem set but covering skills that you will need
for future problem sets. Everyone should bring their laptop with R installed and ready to
go. Your entire hour will be spent interacting with your computer and each other, with an
expert (your TF) nearby to answer any questions.
You are free to use any published materials (e.g., a textbook), in preparing Econ 131
assignments or for learning the material more generally. Similarly, you are free to use online
resources such as stackoverflow questions or R tutorials. You are also strongly encouraged
to work with others in your class. This is particularly helpful for learning to program.
Each person must turn in their own assignment.
The use of any solution materials prepared in a previous year for Econ 131, other than
materials distributed this academic year by the course faculty, is strictly prohibited and
constitutes cheating. This includes 1) any notes, spreadsheets, or handouts distributed by
me in a prior term of Econ 131; and 2) any notes, solutions, or spreadsheets prepared by
former students of Econ 131, in either written or electronic form.
This policy means you should not solicit or use solutions to previous years’ problem sets.
The reason for this policy is that access to previous year’s materials can create serious
inequities between fellow students, and jeopardize the integrity of the academic environment.
Any potential violation of this policy will be reported. Academic disciplinary
actions will be taken against those who violate this policy.
We take cheating and plagiarism VERY seriously. Every class you have ever take probably
states that cheating will not be tolerated, but we mean it.
Cheating or plagiarism will result in a 0 on the assignment and reported to the department.
You are welcome to work together in groups up to 4, but you are required to submit your
own write-up and your own code. Please take precautions to avoid putting the Teaching
Assistants or myself in a situation where we are forced to decide if two documents are
“too similar”. As future researchers, consultants, bankers, entrepreneurs, etc, learning to
do honest work in a timely manner is more important than getting everything correct.
If you are uncertain, please add proper citation. For example, if you relied heavily on
a group-member’s code for one part of an assignment, then you should make a footnote
highlighting this fact. This may result in a slightly lower grade, but as long as proper
credit is clearly given, it does not constitute cheating. The one exception to this rule is
using past material from any previous version of this course.
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
SOFTWARE
Much of the course work in Econ 131 will involve analysis of data using R, an open
source implementation of the object-oriented programming language S. It is widely used
by applied statisticians and its libraries implement a wide variety of statistical and graph-
ical techniques with applications to a range of disciplines, such as the agricultural and
biological sciences, genetics, neuroscience and economics. R can be downloaded from
https://cran.r-project.org. We will provide some handouts on the use of R, the TFs
will help you with R in sections, and the program documentation is excellent. There are
also many excellent and free R references available online, for example, Econometrics in
R by G. Farnsworth that is available for free. If your time permits and you want to dig
deeper, there are also more programming oriented references such as An Introduction to R
by W. N. Venables, D. M. Smith and the R Core Team. However, I recommend learning
by trial and error, as it is the most time efficient approach and sufficient for the type of
coding problems that we will consider.
If you have never used R (and have never used another programming language), I would
recommend completing one or both of these free online introduction tutorials:
• www.codeschool.com/courses/try-r
• www.datacamp.com
TEXTBOOKS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This class is in large part derived from the econometrics course that Professor Edward
Vytlacil taught at Yale in Fall 2017 and Professor Nicholas Ryan taught at Yale in Spring
2017. These courses were in turn derived in large part from the course Professor Douglas
McKee taught at Yale in Fall 2015, which in turn was heavily influenced by the course
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
Professor Lanier Benkard taught at Yale in Fall 2010. The course structure, slides, and
problem sets are also influenced by discussions with Dr. Rebecca Toseland and the course
material from Professor Raj Chetty’s Econ 45 at Stanford University, as well as discussions
with Professor Lisa Kahn from Yale School of Management. I’m extremely grateful to
them for sharing their syllabus, lecture slides, assignments, handouts, exams, and advice.
In addition, Majed Dodin and Eduardo Fraga prepared the data sets for this course and
helped tremendously with the construction of the problem sets and revisions to the slides.
I am grateful to them as well. I also thank Winnie van Dijk for sharing material from the
econometrics class she taught at the University of Chicago. The diversity statetment on
this syllabus draws heavily from publicly posted statements by Michelle Morgan and Nancy
Niemi. I take full responsibility for any mistakes that I may have added to the material.
CLASSROOM POLICIES
MISC
Note that the economics program has changed its CIP code. The new CIP code (for
Classification of Instructional Programs) by the National Center for Education Statistics
at the Department of Education is 45.0603 (Econometrics and Quantitative Economics)
rather than the old one 45.0601 (Economics, General).
This syllabus serves as a road map for the course and is subject to change as needed.
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
Week 1: Introduction
Lecture: January 16 and 18.
Lab: Open office hours (in Harkness) for help installing R and questions about
the course or first homework.
PS: Problem set 1 assigned, due January 25.
Topics:
– Course overview
– Terminology and concepts: experiments, outcomes, and events
– Brief introduction to probabilities and conditional probabilities.
– Introduction and overview of R
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
Topics:
– Discrete vs. Continuous Random Variables
– Cumulative Distribution Functions
– Probability Density and Probability Mass Functions.
– Expected Values and Variances of Continuous Random Variables
– The Bernoulli and the Binomial Distribution
– The Uniform and the Normal Distribution
– Joint, Marginal and Conditional Distributions
– Correlation and covariance
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
– Prediction
SPRING BREAK
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Yale University Econ 131, Spring 2018
Lab: TBD
Quiz: Quiz 4 assigned April 17 and due April 19.
Topics:
– Difference in differences
– Regression discontinuity
– Relation to instrumental variables
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