EC 425 - Applied Economic Forecasting

(3.00 cr.)

Prerequisite: EC 103 , EC 420 or ST 381 , MA 151 or MA 251 . A grade of C or better required in all prerequisites. Forecasts play a crucial role in the formation of economic policy and business decisions. As a result, accurate predictions of the future are critical for the public and private sector alike. This course introduces students to the techniques used by professional economists in business and government to model the complex processes generating data through time and to make real world forecasts. The steps and methods required to develop a forecast-from understanding the properties of time-series data to forecast evaluation-are defined. Topics include modeling trends, seasonality and cycles, ARMA and ARIMA models, forecast combination, vector-autoregression, and nonlinear methods. (Spring only)