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BOOK REVIEW "USING PYTHON FOR INTRODUCTORY ECONOMETRICS"

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Tihana Škrinjarić
Croatian National Bank
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 Škrinjarić, T.: Book review ”Using Python for introductory econometrics”

Tihana Škrinjarić
Croatian National Bank
10000 Zagreb, Croatia
[email protected]

BOOK REVIEW
“USING PYTHON FOR
INTRODUCTORY ECONOMETRICS”

Authors: Florian Heiss and Daniel Brunner ous book review referring to R. That it is free is a
Publisher: Florian Heiss and Daniel Brunner great argument, important for students and young
researchers who do not have access to financial re-
Year: 2020
sources. Moreover, many difficult tasks that need
Number of pages: 418 to be calculated and estimated daily in real-world
ISBN: 979-8648436763 economic applications cannot be done with soft-
ware that contains click-only options. The mindset
of programming and defining objects in  Python  is
Economists today need to have knowledge and
very natural, and the online help community is
skills in quantitative tools that enable the analysis
enormous. 
of many different economic phenomena and their
relationships. It is almost impossible to write a re- Like its R counterpart, this book includes online files
search paper, complete a project, or carry out day- that allow the reader to reproduce all the examples
to-day tasks without econometrics and computer given in the book, and again, the authors follow the
support. One popular software is  Python, because econometrics textbook by Wooldridge (2019). This
it is a free resource and relatively user-friendly. If is something very commendable. In fact, most text-
readers are already somewhat familiar with R  (see books focusing on a research area like economet-
the book review “Using R for introductory econo- rics do not include examples done in software, with
metrics”), learning Python will be faster compared data alongside the book. As a result, young people
to those who know nothing about it. However, the learning new concepts sometimes struggle, as theo-
authors of this book focus on some introductory as- retical concepts are often difficult to grasp without
pects of Python thinking and programming before something “tangible”. This does not mean that you
moving on to econometrics and its applications. should learn econometrics exclusively through
The book is available as a hard copy, as a pdf (both books like this one using examples. After all, when
must be purchased), and as a free version available you are solving real-world problems at work, you
at: http://www.upfie.net/read/index.html. Thus, au- will be dealing with issues that are not covered in
thors are motivated to teach these topics in the best books like this (assumptions about models that you
way possible, so if anyone is interested in these top- need to know before you use them, the use of more
ics, there is no excuse not to it. sophisticated methods than those presented in the
There is a similar motivation for learning econo- books, etc.). But if you are learning econometrics,
metrics in Python to what I mentioned in my previ- it is very helpful to read a book like this in parallel
Vol. 35, No. 1 (2022), pp. 223-224 223
Škrinjarić, T.: Book review ”Using Python for introductory econometrics”

so that you learn how to deal with real data and use References
them to estimate models in specific software. 
1. Škrinjarić, T. (2021). Book review “Using R
The structure of this book follows the previous one
for introductory econometrics”. Ekonomski
dedicated to  R, and since I have already reviewed
vjesnik, 34(1), 243-244.
that book, I will not repeat the same structure. The
ideas are the same: you should take an economet- 2. Wooldridge, J. (2019). Introductory Economet-
rics textbook and learn econometrics there (a good rics, A Modern Approach (7th ed). Cengage
example is the aforementioned book by Wool- Learning.
dridge, if you want to follow the examples in this
book). The basic concepts are the same: you learn
which modules are used so that certain commands
can be activated; the layout of windows in Python
is similar to that of R, and numerous examples and
interpretations are given throughout the book.
If you are covering an area in an econometrics text-
book, pick up this book and review the examples to
fully understand the concept at hand. If you are ask-
ing me which book is better, or if it is better to learn
R or Python, well, that depends. I started with R, so
learning Python was much easier than I expected. I
suppose it would be similar the other way around.
This is because the mindset is similar in terms of
defining objects, models, variables, and getting the
results you need in econometrics. I would recom-
mend this book, similarly to my previous review, to
those who already have some knowledge of econo-
metrics and need to expand their software skills in
tackling real-world tasks, and to those who are be-
ginning to learn econometrics to be prepared to use
these tools in their work.

224 Vol. 35, No. 1 (2022), pp. 223-224

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