Due 8am EST Wednesday Sept 5, 2018

Econ B2000, MA Econometrics

Kevin R Foster, CCNY

This first HW has complicated multiple due dates for different parts, see details below. In general HW are due after each class, where I usually give you night-owls the option of working until 8am the next morning.

Each student should submit a separate assignment, even if it is an identical computer file to the rest of your study group. When submitting assignments, please include your name and the assignment number as part of the filename. Please write the names of your study group members at the beginning of your homework.

  1. What are the names of the people in your study group?
  2. Work on the Hawkes stats review - you must complete the diagnostic test by end of the day Monday Sept 24.
  3. this is due Tuesday before class “Adjust” the dice I gave out to you, by sanding, heating, drilling, gluing, squeezing or whatever. Can you get them to roll a 6 more often than would be expected? How would you know - what is “more often”? Can you write some code in R that will simulate a fair roll? Bring the dice to class, we’ll have a tournament.
  4. Open up R (in the lab here on campus or if you’re working on a home computer, download and install it). Replicate the commands given in the lecture notes R Basics for Lecture 1 to do some simple stats on the PUMS data. Those notes request that you find average ages for men and women after accounting for the top-coding. Tell me something else interesting, that you learned from the PUMS data, for example about educational attainments in different neighborhoods in the city. Are there surprises for you?
  5. Differences in means can be complicated. Find the mean return on SP500 index (choose a time period). What is the mean return on days when the previous day’s return was positive? When the previous 2 days were positive? Negative? Now read about “hot hands fallacy” and tell if you think that helps investment strategy. (You might start with this tweet, and read the papers referenced.)

The dice example is from Andrew Gelman’s book on Teaching Stats.