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STATISTICS FOR ECONOMISTS: A BEGINNING
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The pages that follow contain the material presented in my introductory
quantitative methods in economics class at the University of Toronto. They
are designed to be used along with any reasonable statistics textbook. The
most recent textbook for the course was James T. McClave, P. George Ben-
son and Terry Sincich,
Statistics for Business and Economics
, Eighth Edi-
tion, Prentice Hall, 2001. The material draws upon earlier editions of that
book as well as upon John Neter, William Wasserman and G. A. Whitmore,
Applied Statistics
, Fourth Edition, Allyn and Bacon, 1993, which was used
previously and is now out of print. It is also consistent with Gerald Keller
and Brian Warrack,
Statistics for Management and Economics
, Fifth Edi-
tion, Duxbury, 2000, which is the textbook used recently on the St. George
Campus of the University of Toronto. The problems at the ends of the chap-
ters are questions from mid-term and final exams at both the St. George
and Mississauga campuses of the University of Toronto. They were set by
Gordon Anderson, Lee Bailey, Greg Jump, Victor Yu and others including
myself.
This manuscript should be useful for economics and business students en-
rolled in basic courses in statistics and, as well, for people who have studied
statistics some time ago and need a review of what they are supposed to have
learned. Indeed, one could learn statistics from scratch using this material
alone, although those trying to do so may find the presentation somewhat
compact, requiring slow and careful reading and thought as one goes along.
I would like to thank the above mentioned colleagues and, in addition, Ado-
nis Yatchew, for helpful discussions over the years, and John Maheu for
helping me clarify a number of points. I would especially like to thank Gor-
don Anderson, who I have bothered so frequently with questions that he
deserves the status of mentor.
After the original version of this manuscript was completed, I received some
detailed comments on Chapter 8 from Peter Westfall of Texas Tech Univer-
sity, enabling me to correct a number of errors. Such comments are much