Quantitative Methods for Economics
Instructors: Stefano Favaro and Paolo Ghirardato
NEWS:
EXAM GRADE TRANSCRIPTION (REGISTRAZIONE ESAME): Next exam grade transcriptio will take place Friday, March 16 at 9, in Prof. Ghirardato's office in the Dipartimento.
PAOLO GHIRARDATO'S OFFICE HOURS:
Starting March 2012, Prof. Ghirardato will see students by appointment (send an email).
STEFANO FAVARO'S OFFICE HOURS:
Starting March 2012, Prof. Favaro will see students by appointment (send an email).
SYLLABUS: This course aims to develop many of the analytical tools which are fundamental for theoretical and applied Economics. Particular emphasis will be posed on continuity and convexity on one side and on the role of the likelihood function in the statistical theory of the point estimation, hypothesis testing and confidence sets.
The course is divided in two parts, each one counting for 6 CFUs:
Part 1: Statistical Inference (Favaro)
- Random samples and their distributions, the statistical model, the likelihood function, exponential family
- Sufficient statistics and minimal sufficient statistics, finite properties for estimators, asymptotic properties for estimators, methods for evaluating estimators
- Methods for constructing point estimators: method of moments and generalizations, method of the least square errors, method of maximum likelihood, methods of minimum distance
- Hypothesis testing: probabilistic structure of hypothesis testing, Neyman-Pearson lemma, likelihood ration tests, asymptotic tests, confidence sets
Part 2: Economic Real Analysis
- Metrics and norms
- Continuity
- Connectedness, completeness and compactness
- A brief look at constrained optimization
- Convexity and the separating hyperplane theorems
- Fixed point theorems
The following are the required textbooks for the course:
- Adelchi Azzalini, Statistical Inference: Based on the Likelihood, Chapman and Hall, London, 1996
- N.L. Carothers, Real Analysis, Cambridge University Press,Cambridge 1999, Chapters 1-8 and 10
- Massimo Marinacci and Luigi Montrucchio, Notes on Calculus on Vector Spaces, unpublished manuscript, chapters 9 and 10 and section 6.6
- C.D. Aliprantis and K.C. Border, Infinite-Dimensional Analysis, third edition, Springer-Verlag, 2007, part of Chapter 5
PART 2 (Economic Real Analysis) EXERCISES: The following exercises (to appear soon!) are very important as practice and verification of your understanding of the course material.
PAST EXAMS: The following are some past exams for this course:
CONTACTS
ghirardato at econ.unito.it
favaro at econ.unito.it
Back to Paolo's page
Created: 09/10/09. Last revised: 14/03/12