Econometrics In R

cran.r-project.org

39 points·Anon84··8 comments

I really like the idea of doing Econometric work with R. Currently, I've been looking for a more hands on way to run some regressions and test data, this guide looks to prove immensely useful.

Out of curiosity, why not something like Mathematica?

Because Mathematica costs at least $2000+ and R is free software. That makes R more suitable for teaching purpose.

Almost the only reason you'd need to use R. I cringe when professors ask their students to use non-free software when equivalent or better free alternative exist.

I've had mainly 3 reasons to switch to R:

(1) It's free

(2) It has a huge repositoriy of libraries. There's hardly anything that you can't do with R. In my special case it was about hazard-rate models, which are barely implemented in other tools that I tried (namely EViews, SPSS)

(3) It has a BIG community behind it, which you can ask for help once you're stuck. I haven't found this kind of "service" in other software (namely, again, EViews).

In a mostly irrelevant personal note Grant and I graduated in Numerical Mathematics from BYU the same year; there were only a handful of us so we spent a lot of time together in the top floor of the Math/CS Building. He was working on this during a big chunk of our undergrad and I think some after as well. I'm embarrassed to say I haven't taken the R plunge yet (SAS and STATA right now) but when I do I'm sure this will be my starting point.

This paper covers a lot of the basics in addition to the complex stuff I don't understand yet. I'll definitely be keeping it saved as a general R reference as I do more work in R.

Futurama?

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