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ECON 233
Introduction to Economic Data and Statistics ECON 233 (3)
ECON 233 introduces statistical methods, concepts and their application to economic data using both spreadsheets (e.g., Excel) and a specialized statistical programming language such as R. Prerequisite: MATH 150, MATH 151, MATH 154, or MATH 157, with a minimum grade of C-; 15 units. MATH 150, MATH 151, MATH 154, or MATH 157 may be taken concurrently with ECON 233. Students who have taken ECON 333 first may not then take this course for further credit. STAT 270 or BUS 232 will be accepted in lieu of this course.
*Note: I = skill to be introduced in the course, D= skill to be further developed
Analyze and Interpret economic data
Interpret key economic data
- Identify primary sources of economic data (I)
Interpret statistical evidence and methodology
- Calculate common statistics by hand from a small data set (I)
- Calculate the expected value of a discrete random variable from its PDF (I)
- Construct and interpret a t-test (I)
- Distinguish between parameters and statistics/estimators (I)
- Distinguish between population and sample (I)
- Interpret other important univariate statistics (variance, standard deviation) (I)
- Interpret confidence interval and sets (I)
- Interpret crosstabs and pivot tables (I)
- Interpret measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) (I)
- Interpret the results of a hypothesis test (I)
- Perform basic probability calculations (I)
- Calculate and interpret conditional expectations (I)
- Calculate variances and covariances of random variables (I)
- Interpret important bivariate statistics (covariance, correlaion) (I)
- Interpret joint and conditional distributions (I)
Conduct statistical and/or quantitative analysis using a computer
- Manage data and code (I)
- Use a spreadsheet (e.g., Excel) to enter, view and calculate data (I)
- Use a spreadsheet to calculate univariate summary statistics (I)
- Use a spreadsheet to construct crosstabs and pivot tables (I)
Use oral, written, and graphical methods to communicate economic insights
Present economic arguments by means of graphs, charts and tables
- Construct and interpret a pie chart (I)
- Construct and interpret a time series plot (I)
- Construct and interpret a crosstab or pivot table (I)
- Construct and interpret a scatter plot (I)
- Construct and interpret a table of summary statistics (I)
- Construct and interpret a univariate histogram or density plot (I)
Use multiple methods in combination to communicate economic insights
- Write a report that uses data to address an economic question (I)
