Discussion

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?

Notes:

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?

Notes:

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.

Notes:

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.

Notes:

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?

Notes:

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?

Notes:

Share with class (6 min)¶

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