Unit information: Quantitative Methods for Economics, Finance and Management in 2016/17

Unit name	Quantitative Methods for Economics, Finance and Management
Unit code	ECONM1012
Credit points	15
Level of study	M/7
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12)
Unit director	Dr. Crespo
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	School of Economics
Faculty	Faculty of Social Sciences and Law

Description including Unit Aims

An introduction to quantitative methods for economics, finance and management including statistics and econometrics. The first part of the course concentrates on basic statistical techniques which are required for the study of econometrics in the second part of the course. Although a number of key theoretical concepts are introduced, the emphasis is on applying statistical and econometric techniques to applied problems in economics, finance and management.

Unit aims:

1. To give students an understanding of basic concepts in statistics, which are used in economic and financial theory and form a foundation of econometrics.
2. A thorough grounding in basic econometric techniques which will enable students to use these techniques in their dissertation and to understand and assess published econometric results.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Students should be able to understand and use fundamental ideas in statistics; Probability distribution, moments of a distribution, estimation, and hypothesis testing. They should be able to use simple estimation and hypothesis testing procedures in econometrics and to understand econometric results techniques to analyse and test economic hypotheses. They should also be able to read and understand texts and journal articles which involve econometric work and appreciate the problems which researchers are faced with when dealing with real data. On completion of the course students should be in a position to apply econometric techniques to their dissertation topic.

Teaching Information

Lectures, exercise lectures and tutorials.

Assessment Information

The unit will be assessed by an individual assignment which will have a weight of 25 per cent of the final mark, and a two-hour written exam which will have 75 per cent weight. In the assignment the student has to answer questions related to a given real-world dataset. This course work is designed to examine:

• The student’s ability to work with the concepts and techniques introduced in the course.

• The application of statistic and econometric techniques to answer real-world empirical questions.

• The student’s expertise in using the econometrics program STATA.

In the examination, questions will be set to test understanding of key concepts and the methods of statistical and econometric inference (estimation, testing and confidence intervals). Similarly, econometric models will be provided so that students can demonstrate their ability to interpret empirical results.

Reading and References

• Stock, J. H. and M.W. Introduction to Econometrics: Brief Edition, Pearson Education, Boston, 2008.

• Gujurati, D.N. Essentials of Econometrics, McGraw-Hill, New York, 3rd edition, 2006.

• Mendenhall, Schaeffer and Wackerly. Mathematical Statistics with applications, Duxbery Press, Boston, 3rd edition, 1986.