Customer Reviews

Econometric Analysis of Panel Data

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The review posted by the anonymous reader from CT seems a little too harsh to me. The book offers a decent overview over many interesting areas of panel data. In particular, one and two way error components are discussed, one chapter is devoted to hypotheses testing, heteroscedasticity and serial correlation and dynamic panel data models respectively. However it is true, that the authour does not provide much help to understand the literature which is just reproduced (often word by word from the papers!). The book is not recommended to someone who wants to read about Panel Data but doesn't have a lot of knowledge about the subject yet.

To say that this book is scandalous would only be a mere exaggeration. Instead of clarifying the literature on Panel Data, the author just sums up some papers (often citing them word by word; why bother then buying a book? Just copy the articles!) without adding any value to them. Even worse, while summarizing, the essence of the papers often goes missing. The only value of the book consists of a quite complete reference list of the literature up to 1994. (However, the list is of course a little biased in favor of the author. He mentions every minuscule and unimportant publication of himself. One could almost get the impression that he contributed to Panel Data) Expecting a book that provides the main ideas and clarifies them together with a clear notation and proofs of the result, I was very disappointed with Badi Baltagi's book! Not recommended at all! (Unfortunately there is no alternative I know of!)

I have not read the second edition of this book, but my experience of the first edition when reading for my economics doctorate was that it was not an easy book to use. In particular, it had a rather ideosyncratic view of the literature. Certainly, it is curious that there are two pages of references to the Author's work and less that one of Maddala, Arrelano, Bond, Pesaran and Smith combined.

I found that "Analysis of Panel Data" by Cheng Hsiao combined with a few choice papers was a more useful strategy. The first edition of Hsiao has been a classic since it was released in the mid eighties and dispite it being an Econometric Society monograph, is much clearer and easier to understand. It has now been updated to include dynamic and discrete response models and will, I believe, remain the classic Panel Data text for years to come, although I have not read Arellano's book.

Well, it may be a very scholarly text on panel econometrics, but the cover promises otherwise. For a researcher with moderate knowledge of matrix algebra, and with no mood for diving into mathematical proofs, this book is practically useless. The examples are few and not explicit, and the text is not readable by anyone who is not the author and understands perfectly every little corner of the theory. A waste of money and I am planning to return it (maybe Amazon will give me the refund ;)

There is hardly much expository material on this topic without complex notation from line 2 onwards. This book is no exception. If the author wants to sell the book in significant numbers, it would be useful to write another book (based on this) for the applied economists. RATS has many helpful PRGs to solve the examples. The author may use them and draft his new book using these examples. Example EViews files will be also very useful. I wish this author all the bestEconometric Analysis of Panel Data

The fact that Prof. Baltagi goes in deep detail through his own (an extensive) work must be seen as a plus to those interested in becoming involved in research (specially in hypothesis testing). It is unfrequent that an author provides a guided tour through the backstage of his research papers, and Baltagi should be congratulated for this honest effort, it help me considerably with my own research. Whether it serves the purposes of casual readers looking for a broad introduction, is debatable (there were no book around when I learned this), in my opinion it does it.

The first sentence of the first comment apparently confuses "mere" with "slight". Also, his judgement is too harsh. The book definitely deserves two stars.