Author Description

Product DescriptionReal Stats provides an engaging and practical introduction to econometrics for upper level undergraduates and first year graduate students in political science, public policy, law, and economics.Many students expect statistics to be hard, boring, and irrelevant. Experienced instructors know that overcoming these views is key to jumpstarting student engagement, a necessary first step in learning the material and developing a passion that can carry students on to serious research. Written ina chatty, conversational style, Real Stats begins by inviting students to see how econometric tools can help answer important and interesting questions such as why people vote, how to organize our health care system, which government programs work best, and whether or not tall people get higherwages.Real Stats achieves student engagement while offering serious statistical training. The book covers the modern statistical toolkit, ranging from OLS to field experiments, panel data analysis, instrumental variables, probit and logit models. The book ties together these topics under the twin themesof fighting endogeneity and accounting for uncertainty in estimates.Real Stats is built to work in multiple course contexts. Instructors teaching a first semester course can start from scratch on page 1 and find everything they need to get students to a mature understanding of regression. Political science or public policy instructors teaching a second semestercourse for undergraduate or graduate students can use the early parts of the book as a review and focus on modern identification strategies inherent in panel models, instrumental variables approaches, field experiments and regression-discontinuity designs. Economics instructors teaching atraditional econometrics course for economics and business majors will find thorough coverage of the most frequently used methods of econometric analysis and a diverse array of examples and case studies applicable to public policy and political science as well as economics. Instructors teaching moremathematical classes can use this as a supplement that explains intuition and connects the methods to real-world applications.About the AuthorMichael A. Bailey, B.A. Notre Dame; M.A. (Political Science); M.A. (Economics), PhD, Stanford. Michael is a Princeton University Press co-author with Forrest Maltzman of The Constrained Court: Law, Politics and the Decisions Justices Make in which they correctly predicted that the June 28, 2012ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court would uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. (See http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/06/28/the-law-matters/). His areas of specialization are Congress, Supreme Court, statistics, formal models, separation of powers and federalism. He is the ColonelWilliam J. Walsh Professor of American Government in the Georgetown University Department of Government and the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. He spent this past year as the John G. Winant Visiting Professor of American Government at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. Hehas taught Econometrics to both Economics and Political Science students and incorporates student feedback and focus groups each time he teaches the course. He has returned to Georgetown and will teach the class again in the fall with a goal of having a complete manuscript to review by December2012.