The field of econometrics has developed rapidly over the past three decades, and the use of up-to-date econometric techniques has become more and more standard practice in empirical work in many fields of economics. Collectively the three workshops will attempt to lay the foundation to use a subset of these techniques and support the understanding of more advanced material. As suggested above, three separate training workshops will be offered in time-series, cross-section and panel data econometrics respectively.

For the second workshop, which is facilitated by Steven Koch (University of Pretoria), it is assumed that all students are comfortable with basic statistical methods, such as the calculation of means and standard deviations, as well as hypothesis testing, primarily t, z, and F-distribution based tests. Participants are expected to have a modest understanding of matrix algebra, meaning that the participant can interpret the solution to the OLS problem. Finally, it is assumed that participants have a modicum of understanding of STATA, or at least the structure of programming.