Customer Reviews

Introduction to Econometrics (The Addison-Wesley Series in Economics)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is a great textbook for undergraduate econometrics (some graduate students would also benefit from some chapters, like the one on Instrumental Variables, or Program Evaluation, or the chapters on Time Series & Forecasting). No wonder Mark Watson is one of the authors, since he is one of the best teachers I ever had. The book is clear, and it skips a lot of useless, obsolete stuff that most undergraduates have typically to go over just because everyone else has gone over it before. No time wasted with homoskedasticity, "fixed" regressors, Durbin-Watson. Everything is based on large-sample theory, the regressors are never assumed to be "nonstochastic", and homoskedasticity is treated as an exception (which is what happens in practice), not as a rule. There are nice, long empirical applications in each chapter, and some examples are dealt with in more chapters, so that you can see how new concepts are applied to the same problem, and how our understanding of the problem changes and improves with more refined tools. For more advanced students, mathematical appendixes (and a few chapters at the end) also provide reasonably accessible but relatively complex proofs. A great book.

I found the book to be adequate in terms of how well-written it is, but lacking in many areas that keep it from getting anything higher than 3 stars.

My biggest gripe is that there are few examples. I really took this for granted, and didn't notice how important it was until they were taken out. In classes like math, you can easily get lost in all the notation in each formula. Examples are important because they show you how to use that formula in a real application. The book lacks examples, and this really makes it harder to understand what Stock and Watson are talkin about.

Another thing I'd like are answers to their problems. This is just useful so that you can check whether you are doing the problems at the end of the chapter right. Otherwise, you're completely clueless on how well you are doing.

An uneven book. Some of the explanations are clear and the long applications can be quite interesting and useful. However, several times the authors do not give an explanation that would be intuitively easier to understand. It would also have been helpful to provide some simpler, even if artificial, examples in addition to the longer applications.

These can no doubt be fixed in a second edition. At present, the revised edition of Wooldridge or even the older Jack Johnston is more intuitively appealing, while Greene is more complete.

If you already know the subject, then the book's probably great. If you're like most people and need the book to learn material for an econometrics class, then you're in for a world of hurt if this is the book you're required to use.

There are no examples, and the end of chapter questions don't obviously correlate to a specific place in the chapter that you can refer to in order to facilitate learning the material quickly. Instead, you end up looking through the preceding chapters over and over for sections that kind of tell you what you need to know, but not directly.

When your treasure hunt for simple information fails, you have to refer to stats texts from previous classes, the internet, and everywhere else for help. Even then, there is no way to check yourself while doing the work, so you might have just spent your entire day teaching yourself to do everything the wrong way.

This is a horrible book that only succeeds at forcing you to waste a ton of time looking to outside sources to acquire information that would be readily available if the book was truly written for an introductory econometrics course.

It is clearly written and has a good level of detail. The very experienced authors were able to get the level right for beginners, while keeping precision and adding examples and current topics of interest even to more experienced users. Definitely a great buy!

My struggle with this textbook is the high cost for limited benefit. one of the most expensive textbooks I've purchased, it was the least used as the teacher lectures were much more beneficial than anything I read in a very wordy quantitative textbook. In addition, the 2nd edition is now nearly worthless as the book sell-back stated a new edition is being released. Wait until the 3rd edition comes out - hopefully the changes will include more examples and less words.

I have a feeling that the people who give this a negative review are students who don't like the class. The book is very easy to understand, filled with real world examples and you can read it without falling asleep (which I find hard for most reference and text books). It is dense but what would you expect? This book gets the reader up to a level early on that would be the envy of most discrete math texts and gets the reader to a point where they can succeed in learning the materiel presented.

the book is missing more examples to pass the concept to the student. I felt that the author has so much information and do not like to make the book bigger than the way the book on it. i understand it is not easy materials but it would have been more useful if the author elaborate the concept with more examples. one of the most important thing that i take on that book is that i had to by another book to go over some statistics concepts and ideas. the book did not consider anyone who did not take statistics in a very long time ago. i think the book needs to be more organized

I am an undergraduate student in my 3rd year taking ECON421 - Introduction to Econometrics. This book was the recommended course textbook by the department of Economics.

Honestly, it is THE WORST econometrics textbook on the market as of now. The book is a difficult read that requires you to dissect each and every paragraph so that you can understand it fully. Examples are minimum, and the book seems to have more proofs than practical examples and applications.

There are also so many words in the textbook with the "Econometrics" lingo that you really don't seem to grasp a conceptual understanding since its written in such high technical vocab.

This textbook may be a decent graduate intro econometrics course but I dont recommend it at all if you are taking the course in undergrad.

I recommend that you buy Introductory Econometrics by Jeffrey Woolbridge.
It is much better and way more readable.

I've only used one other econometrics textbook and this the superior of the two. I felt that the text was excellently written, and gave the instructor and the student the option of treating the subjects as technical or less technical and more conceptual. The appendix in the end of the chapters are very helpful and clearly written. The examples and the outline of the material are clear and concise. This textbook seems very flexible. I recommend it.