Introduction to Econometrics

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.

This will be used for an entry graduate level, non-econ majors course in econometrics. The exposition is clear, logical and does not contain any math that is not absolutely required. Also contains examples without bogging down on them. It does not contain much mention of the software, but that may be on the associated website that I have not checked out.

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!

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'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.