Econometrics (Eco 321)

Course Overview

Welcome to Econometrics (Eco 321)! Think of this class as your guide to the powerful (and yes, sometimes puzzling) world of economic data. Our main mission is to learn how to find the real story—the signal—in a sea of noisy information, without getting lost along the way. We’ll dive into the essential tools every economist uses to make sense of the real world. You'll learn how to build and interpret models, understand what those mysterious regression assumptions actually mean, and develop a sharp eye for telling solid research apart from something that just looks fancy. But this isn't just about theory. We’ll get our hands dirty with actual data—learning how to manage it, visualize it, and ask it questions. We'll be using some Python for this, but if you’ve never coded before, don't worry. We start from scratch, and I promise you'll get the hang of it. By the end of the semester, you won't just know how the tools work; you'll know how to use them to ask better questions, avoid common traps, and finally have the perfect comeback when someone says, “But correlation doesn’t equal causation!”

Syllabus