Getting Started

Aleksandr Michuda

Welcome!!!!

About Me

  • Grew up in Brooklyn, NY
  • Came here when I was 3 from Ukraine

Undergraduate Education

  • Graduated with Masters in Economics and Bachelor’s in Philosophy

Graduate Education

  • PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics
    • Studied Industrial Organization and Development Economics
  • Research
    • New technologies in developing countries
    • Rideshare (Uber, SafeBoda)
    • Drones for health supply delivery
    • Data Gaps
    • Remote Sensing
    • Machine Learning
  • Teaching
    • EC034 - Data Science for Economists
    • EC031 - Intro. to Econometrics

After Graduate School

Research at Cornell

  • Center for Data Science for Enterprise and Society

My Research

  • How do households use new technologies to cope with shocks?
    • Droughts/floods
    • Migration/Agriculture
  • Uber Drivers in Uganda
    • Can flexibility in setting labor hours be a net benefit?
  • Can we help drivers smooth shocks by giving access to weather insurance?
  • How much does the structure of earnings affect their labor supply and behavior? What if we provided them with more salary-like earnings?

Other Research

  • What is the effectiveness of using UAV drones to deliver health supplies in hard-to-reach areas in Ghana?

  • What are the impacts (both intended and unintended) of a policy in India to allow women to work in factories at night?

  • How well can we predict human capital indicators (?) using remote sensing data?

  • But started in something WAAAY different:

    • Effects of 1905 Russian land reform on market power in peasant agriculture

Not at Work

  • Hiking
  • Reading
  • Video Games (open world RPGs)
  • Trying new restaurants

Your Turn

  • What kinds of questions do you want to answer with econometrics?
  • What are your interests?
  • Why are you taking this course?

What is this course about?

  • How do we use econometrics to understand economic problems?
  • What is the difference between econometrics and statistics?
  • What is causality?
  • What is regression?
  • What is linear regression?
  • Why do economists like to use linear regression?
  • Why are economists so interested in normality?

Syllabus Review

  • Prereq: EC31
  • Class Meeting and Location: MW 10:30-11:45; Kohlberg 115
  • Office: Kohlberg 220
  • Textbook: Essentials of Statistics for Business and Economics, 9th edition
  • Non-graphing calculator

Course Expectations

  • We will learn about random variables and statistical functions
  • Requires some algebra
  • Attendance is strongly encouraged
  • Econometrics is about being exposed to concepts over and over until it “clicks.”

Office Hours

  • Really good tutoring program
    • It’s free!
    • You ask questions to the tutor and then they write your exam.
    • What is it?

Additional Resources

  • Office Hours: MW 12-1 and by appointment
  • Meet with me: https://calendar.app.google/JnBAUe2jEY9fnMpQ7
  • Please schedule office hours if needed! They are there for you!
  • 1:1 tutoring with a TA is also available, but needs to be scheduled

Grading

Task Percentage Grade

  • Problem Sets 15%
  • Midterm 20%
  • Final Exam 20%
  • In-class Group Activities 25%
  • Group Project 20%

Participation

  • You need to actively participate in class discussions. You learn more when you are actively participating instead of passively listening to lectures!
  • Don’t hesitate to ask questions.
  • No such thing as a bad question. I’m sure if you have a question, odds are someone else is having the same thought
  • Participation (and indirectly, attendance) counts towards your grade!

Problem Sets

  • There will be problem sets every other week
  • Problem sets are individual submission
  • No late problem sets; get to drop lowest one. See syllabus for rest

Group Project

  • With a group, your job will be to submit and then present a replication project
  • Economics and other social sciences put much more emphasis on replicability and data transparency.
  • Most peer-reviewed journals have a replication policy and make replication packages publicly available
  • Your group project will be to replicate a paper, write-up what the paper was about, how easy it was to replicate, and submit your project AS a replication package.
  • A list of papers will be provided to choose from.

In-class Group Activities

  • Every Wednesday, we will have group activities in class.
  • These will be worth 15% of your grade.
  • These activities will include empirical exercises that will help hone your Stata skills and your understanding of econometric concepts.
  • You will work in groups of 2-3 people for these activities. Your two lowest scores on these activities will be dropped.

TA Clinics

  • Clinic hours will be held on Tuesdays, 7-9pm in Kohlberg 116
  • Attending TA and clinic hours are immensely helpful!

Tip

Sydney Ross

Bori Chung

Grace Liu

Nicholas Zuk

Stata

  • Part of this course involves learning how to do data analysis, directory structure and coding in Stata
  • This is an invaluable skill that will help you in both this class, any statistics/econometrics course as well as other parts of your life.

Using AI

  • AI is a great helper for code
  • But given the proprietary nature of Stata, helpers like Co-Pilot haven’t been trained on a lot of Stata code.
  • Using AI to help you code is great, but make sure to check that the code makes sense.
  • We will also use AI in some parts of the course so I can teach you how to use it effectively.

Stata Workshops

  • Dr. Tao Wang (twang1@swarthmore.edu) is the Lead Associate of the Social Sciences Quantitative Lab.
  • He is available through his own office hours as a resource for your Stata needs and your empirical projects. Ella Foster-Molina and the SSQL TAs will also hold office hours that you may attend; these hours are also described at the link above.
  • Dr. Wang will be teaching 5-6 Stata workshops during the course of our semester. You are required to attend the first workshop.
  • Install Stata on your machine by January 26th. There will be time during the first workshop to help you install it if you run into trouble.

Final Words

  • Econometrics and causal inference are probably the part of economics is used most widely in other fields and is the main contribution to the sciences (very strong statement)
  • Please use office hours to your advantage!
  • Office hours are for you!
  • They are a priority for me and it’s time I set up specifically to help
  • Successful students tend to use office hours
  • I want to get to know you better!