MK68 Empirical Research Methods

Quantitative research methods · Statistics and Econometrics · JLU Giessen

Lecture slides for two cohorts, week by week

Everything used to teach the quantitative part of MK-068-EN Empirical Research Methods at Justus Liebig University Giessen: a prerequisites sheet and seven weeks of lectures, taught in Winter Semester 2023/24 and again, revised, in Winter Semester 2024/25. The 2024/25 decks are published as interactive slides rendered from their source; the slides of both cohorts are available as the PDFs that were shared with students on Ilias.

Taught and written by Eduard Bukin · Institute of Agricultural Policy and Market Research · Source on GitHub

Two cohorts

The same seven-week programme ran twice. The slide sources were revised between the two runs, so the cohorts are kept apart: pick the one you attended.

Winter Semester 2024/25

Part 1: Statistics and Econometrics

Interactive slides rendered from the current sources, plus the twelve PDFs shared on Ilias, added to the repository between 14 October and 27 November 2024.

Winter Semester 2023/24

Part 2: Statistics and Econometrics

The nine PDFs shared on Ilias during the semester, with links to the slide sources as they stood at the time.

Week by week

Each week page brings together the interactive deck, the PDFs of both cohorts, the slide sources and the data behind them.

Week 0

Prerequisites

What to refresh before weeks 1 to 3, with pre-recorded lectures and Khan Academy units, and the additional reading list.

Week 1

Introduction. Descriptive statistics

Population and sample, sampling designs, description versus inference; then central tendency, outliers, weighted means and box plots.

Week 2

Distribution, variance and its applications

Density and cumulative distributions, the Lorenz curve, variance and standard deviation, quantiles, z-scores and the WHO stunting standards.

Week 3

Bi-variate data. Correlation and causation

Scatter plots, trend lines, the correlation coefficient and its pitfalls, and the step from correlation to cause, effect and ceteris paribus.

Week 4

Cause and effect in the RCT. Hypothesis testing. t-tests

Null and alternative hypotheses, the two error types, p-values, and t-tests applied to deworming and conditional cash transfer experiments.

Week 5

Central Limit Theorem. t-distribution. Confidence intervals

From the population distribution to the sampling distribution of the mean, standard errors, confidence intervals and one- and two-sample t-tests.

Week 6

Simple and multiple regression. Bias. Linearity

The regression line and OLS, coefficient interpretation and inference, multiple regression, bias versus efficiency, the six assumptions and linearity.

Week 7

Multiple linear regression. Practice

Three worked examples end to end: hedonic land prices, a rice production function, and returns to fertiliser in a field experiment.

How the materials are labelled

The same icons are used in the sidebar and on every page:

Icon	Material
🖥	Interactive slides: a revealjs deck rendered from the .qmd source, opens full screen
📄	PDF slides, exactly as shared with the cohort on Ilias
💻	Slide source on GitHub (.qmd), at the commit that matches the cohort
📊	A dataset used in the slides, with its provenance
📖	A reading or a reference
📺	A video

About this site

This site collects the lecture materials for the quantitative part of MK-068-EN (TM) Empirical Research Methods at the Institute of Agricultural Policy and Market Research, JLU Giessen. It does not replace the Ilias course page, where the course was run; it makes the slides readable, searchable and downloadable on any device, and keeps the two cohorts’ versions side by side.

Written and taught by Eduard Bukin. All materials are open source and available on GitHub.