Please, please, please read this.
It is an essay written by Josh Angrist and Jörn‐Steffen Pischke (the creators of Mostly Harmless Econometrics) calling for a paradigm shift in econometric teaching. I think that if we changed the way we taught econometrics, students at all levels would be better equipped to write good papers and maybe even more importantly, better equipped to judge the quality of different papers long after they have graduated. Maybe most importantly, those of us teaching applied micro courses could spend less time teaching econometrics and more time on content...ok, maybe that's just me being lazy. ;)
But seriously, I'd love to hear from folks teaching these courses. Do you believe that because we have changed "how we use econometrics we need to change the way we teach econometrics"? Why should students spend so much time thinking about "functional form, whether error terms are
independent and identically distributed, and how to correct for serial correlation
and heteroskedasticity" while researchers spend very little time thinking about them? Is econometrics "better taught by example than abstraction"? (Quotes are taken from the article.)
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