Scope of the final exam

Changelog

2022.12.04: First version.

Setup

Our final exam is a 2 hour closed-book in-person written exam. The schedule is January 9, 2023 from 1430 to 1630 UTC+1. The exam is simultaneously held in Italy and China.

The online option is only provided to students who have not arrived in Italy or China at any time since the beginning of the semester. An app like Teams or DingTalk will be used for invigilation purposes. If you belong to this online option, then I or another administrator will be reaching out to you regarding the protocol and the setup for your desk environment.

You are allowed to bring a non-programmable scientific calculator. You are also not allowed to use any other software.

Advice and support

Prepare earlier so that you can resolve confusions earlier. Do reach out by email or during office hours. I will answer emails until January 2, 2023. Office hours for December are set on Wednesdays (unless something comes up) from 930-1130 Bari local time. A Teams meeting will be open and I will be there waiting.

The questions are designed so that they are “leading”. This means that the questions are not too short because opportunities to assign partial credit have to be built in to the design of the sub-questions. I believe that the exercise sets you were exposed to provide sufficient evidence of what “leading” means. Therefore, the exercises (whether assigned or optional) should give you a flavor of what the final exam could look like. Some of the exercises are already based on past exams.

There is only so much that could be assessed in a 2 hour exam. That means if you are using too much time solving an exercise, you might not be efficiently using the available information. Pay attention to what could and could not be reused.

What I am unable to assess using the written exam can still be assessed using your progress on the individual paper.

What you can safely skip

I list down parts of the slides which may be safely skipped for exam purposes. But for your growth as a user of econometrics, these are unavoidable.

  1. For Weeks 5 to 8 slides:
    1. Bivariate normal distributions
    2. Application: What do surveys accomplish?
  2. For Week 9 slides:
    1. The delta method (SEs for nonlinear functions of the estimated parameters)
    2. The bootstrap
  3. For Week 10 slides:
    1. Delta method standard errors and the bootstrap applied to MRW
    2. The derivations which will lead to the main result of what regression identifies under CIA
    3. Generalizing the method of moments
    4. Derivation of the 2SLS estimand
    5. IV/2SLS diagnostic tests related to Wu-Hausman and weak instruments

What skills you should have

The final exam assesses what I would call “basic minimums”. As the course covers probability, statistics, and econometrics, you may wonder what the basic minimums are. Basic minimums involve

  1. Conceptual understanding
  2. Some comfort with the mathematics (of course, I have indicated at points during lectures what sort of mathematical skills and derivations may be safely skipped)
  3. Ability to use, work, and program with R
  4. Cognizance of how all of them fit together in furtherance of the practice of applied econometrics

In terms of skills needed for the final exam, you should be able to (in no particular order):

  1. Make sense of and use visualizations and descriptive statistics.
  2. Know how to interpret regression results.
  3. Know how to program in R, for example, writing lines of code for a Monte Carlo.
  4. Know how to read lines of R code and make connections to the material.
  5. Work with empirical applications and context. For examples, but not limited to:
    1. Was assumption A3 satisfied?
    2. Do you have a valid instrument?
  6. Provide and interpret derivations and algebraic manipulations. Typically, special and toy examples will be used here.
  7. Know and write about aspects of your individual paper.

Some of these skills may overlap with each other, so pay attention to how topics resurface in different forms.