Organized for Today’s Econometrics Instructor

The fifth edition preserves the overall organization of the fourth. The most noticeable feature that distinguishes this text from most others is the separation of topics by the kind of data being analyzed. This is a clear departure from the traditional approach, which presents a linear model, lists all assumptions that may be needed at some future point in the analysis, and then proves or asserts results without clearly connecting them to the assumptions. My approach is first to treat, in Part 1, multiple regression analysis with cross-sectional data, under the assumption of random sampling. This setting is natural to students because they are familiar with random sampling from a population in their introductory statistics courses. Importantly, it allows us to distinguish assumptions made about the underlying population regression model—assumptions that can be given economic or behavioral content—from assumptions about how the data were sampled. Discussions about the consequences of nonrandom sampling can be treated in an intuitive fashion after the students have a good grasp of the multiple regression model estimated using random samples.