Software

Economics 5330 is taught using Python and the Scientific Stack, a set of core scientific computing packages written and maintained by various third parties.

Our textbook also presents demonstrations of the EViews package for econometric analysis. Students are free and encouraged to use the student version of EViews as the read along in the textbook. But it is not required.

R

We will use R for computational assignments in this class. R is a very powerful programming language, and the de facto language for statistical computing. More and more econometricians are starting to use R as well. Its great strength is the vast number of libraries freely available that implement statistical and econometric models and techniques.

You can download R for your platform at https://www.r-project.org.

However, I suggest that you use the Microsoft R Open version available at https://mran.microsoft.com/download/. Make sure to download the MKL package as well. This offers optimized numerical routines that will speed up our calculations.

Once you have R installed you will also want to install the freely available RStudio Integrated Development Environment, or IDE. It provides a great way to work with R, and is available for all major platforms. Be sure to download the desktop client. It is available here: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download3/.

EViews

The textbook uses the GUI program Eviews to demonstrate econometric applications. You may want to purchase a student license of EViews, which is available here: http://www.eviews.com/EViews9/EViews9SV/evstud9.html. This however, is not mandatory. You can get by in the class just fine without EViews. I will demonstrate it’s use from time to time.

Git

We will use git to keep track of documents, Python source files, etc using git and github.

Linux

While, it is not a requirement I will highly encourage the use of the Linux operating system and UNIX tools for computational exercises. I will using and demonstrating the use of a cloud virtual machine provided by Digital Ocean.