Discussion 1¶

by Professor Throckmorton
for Time Series Econometrics
W&M ECON 408
Slides

0 Introduction (6 min)¶

  • You will need to find some time series papers in economics for the replication exercise and presentation at the end of the class.
  • IDEAS/RePeC Journal Rankings
  • Google Scholar

1 Brain Storm (12 min)¶

  • What economic questions are you interested in?
  • Who or what is important to your question? e.g., households, government etc...
  • If you could observe any time series about them, what would you want to see?

Share with group (6 min)¶

  • Share each other's questions and discuss them briefly.
  • What is the motivation for your question?
  • Does your question reflect or represent any of your other interests/priorities?

Share with class (6 min)¶

  • Let's hear about some of your questions.

2 Research (12 min)¶

  • Goto Google Scholar and search for a paper that tries to answer you question. What did you find?
  • Briefly reading abstracts of a few papers, do you see a clear answer to your/their question(s)?
  • Are the answers/findings interesting to you?
  • Are these papers in good journals or have high citation counts? (>10 citations)

Tip: If you're finding older work, I find it helpful to click the Cited by link below the result to see more recent work that might build on the original paper.

Reflect with group (6 min)¶

  • Given your search results, do you think your question is popular or not?
  • Are you seeing a different way to ask your question? Or are you seeing different questions?
  • Now that you've seen some papers, discuss whether you want to change your question or keep it.

Share with class (6 min)¶

  • Let's hear about some of the papers you found.

3 Data (12 min)¶

  • Of the papers you read the abstracts of, are there any good time series plots? If so, what is being measured/reported? (If nothing is standing out, skim a couple more papers).
  • What is the source of that data? Is the source in the caption, a footnote, or appendix?
  • If you found the source, go to the corresponding website and see if the data is publicly avaible. If yes, how do you access it?

Share with group (6 min)¶

  • Tell your group about your time series plot and data.
  • Decide as a group if you're somewhat confident that you could reproduce the plots you found.
  • Discuss the plots: is the data stationary? does it have a trend? is it seasonal? do you see any possible structural breaks?

Share with class (6 min)¶

  • Let's hear about some of the data you found.