Monday, January 21, 2013

How Many Econometricians Does it Take?

In the December 2012 issue of Significance, a monthly magazine now published jointly by the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society, there's an interesting article titled, "Statistics of Statisticians: Critical Masses for Research Groups".

In this article, Ralph Kenna and Beretrand Berche discuss the idea of critical mass when it comes to the size of research groups in various disciplines. They explain how the so-called "Ringelmann effect" in sociology can be tested, and how this leads to measures of an upper bound on group sizes, "... above which research quality either tends not to improve or the rate of improvement starts to level out."

ÊSTIMATE

ÊSTIMATE stands for "Early Summer Tutorial In Modern Applied Tools of Econometrics" - the title of a course to be run by the Econometrics group at Michigan State University between 31 May and 2 June this year.

The instructors will be Jeff Wooldridge and Tim Vogelsang, and the topics to be covered are: