Data Analysis for Business, Economics, and Policy

Gábor Békés is an assistant professor at the Department of Economics and Business of the Central European University, and Director of the Business Analytics Program. He is a senior fellow at KRTK and a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). He has published in top economics journals on multinational firm activities and productivity, business clusters, and innovation spillovers. He has managed international data collection projects on firm performance and supply chains. He has done policy advising (the European Commission, ECB) as well as private-sector consultancy (in finance, business intelligence, and real estate). He has taught graduate-level data analysis and economic geography courses since 2012. Gábor Kézdi is a research associate professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. He has published in top journals in economics, statistics, and political science on topics including household finances, health, education, demography, and ethnic disadvantages and prejudice. He has managed several data collection projects in Europe; currently, he is co-investigator of the Health and Retirement Study in the US. He has consulted for various governmental and non-governmental institutions on the disadvantage of the Roma minority and the evaluation of social interventions. He has taught data analysis, econometrics, and labor economics from undergraduate to Ph.D. levels since 2002, and supervised a number of MA and Ph.D. students.

Part I. Data Exploration: 1. Origins of data; 2. Preparing data for analysis; 3. Exploratory data analysis; 4. Comparison and correlation; 5. Generalizing from data; 6. Testing hypotheses; Part II. Regression Analysis: 7. Simple regression; 8. Complicated patterns and messy data; 9. Generalizing results of a regression; 10. Multiple linear regression; 11. Modeling probabilities; 12. Regression with time series data; Part III. Prediction: 13. A framework for prediction; 14. Model building for prediction; 15. Regression trees; 16. Random forest and boosting; 17. Probability prediction and classification; 18. Forecasting from time series data; Part IV. Causal Analysis: 19. A framework for causal analysis; 20. Designing and analyzing experiments; 21. Regression and matching with observational data; 22. Difference-in-differences; 23. Methods for panel data; 24. Appropriate control groups for panel data; Bibliography; Index.