Aims

The aim of this course is to introduce the types of reasoning and basic methods used in statistical analysis, and examine how they are used to solve simple statistical problems in the field of Economics and Management. This course also aims to teach the core subject-matter developed in the Statistics and Econometrics courses which students will take later in their degree course.
By the end of the course students should be able to understand basic mechanisms of statistical inferencing and provide practical solutions to standard problems of estimation, confidence interval construction and hypothesis-testing on averages, variances and proportions. They should also be able to model inter-variable relations using simple linear regression models, with a basic introduction to multivariate aspects.

Main themes

Part 1: Basic methods of statistical analysis.
After an introduction to statistical models (population and sampling models), students are shown how statistical sampling distributions form the basis for inferencing. These properties make it possible to check the precision of specific estimators, to construct confidence intervals and to check the risks of error in a hypothesis testing procedure.
Part 2: Application to some standard problems.
In this part, the basic methods taught in Part 1 are adapted to analyzing useful application issues in Economics and Management: Variance analysis (comparison of several averages); inter-variable relation modelling (linear models); Studies of categorical variables including an inter-variable independence test. Students will also be introduced, through simple examples, to the maximum likelihood estimation method, which is particularly useful in the more complex models analysed in later Econometrics courses.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Course materials: References: (for information only) Wonnacott R.J. and Wonnacott T.H. (1990), Introductory Statistics for Business and Economics, New York, John Wiley & Sons (ISBN : 047161517X)

Simar, L. (2003), Statistique en Economie et Gestion, manuscrit 248 pages, Institut de Statistique, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, disponible à la DUC (Chapitres 5 à 13).

Other credits in programs