[.ca] Introduction to Econometrics (ISBN 0321278879)

hard to understand:
the authors are all around when they write this book. hard to understand explanations and few examples. i would recoment my professor another book but we started with this one. :(

This Textbook is Terrible:
Two major concerns with this book. (1) How the hell do you write a textbook that has basically no examples, then, provide no answers to the end of chapter excercises?! For the life of me, I will never be able to understand this logic. (2) Poorly written. It seems when economists try to write on stats (yes, I know, this is 'econometrics') their hard-on gets the best of them and they try to make it more complicated then it needs to be. I have taken courses in regression with texts written by statisticians and it seems they don't feel as though they have as much to prove as Stock and Watson do as economists. For example, it is hilarious how difficult they made the basic content in chapter 3 seem. Who represents z scores like that?!?!

Like the curate's egg: good in parts:
An uneven book. Some of the explanations are clear and the long applications can be quite interesting and useful. However, several times the authors do not give an explanation that would be intuitively easier to understand. It would also have been helpful to provide some simpler, even if artificial, examples in addition to the longer applications. These can no doubt be fixed in a second edition. At present, the revised edition of Wooldridge or even the older Jack Johnston is more intuitively appealing, while Greene is more complete.

Good intro book, bad in time series:
I used Stock & Watson for my first undergraduate econometrics course. I liked it at the time but as I advance in time series I find that one could be much better prepared in this area from an intro course. Time series is a very interesting and big area and using Stock & Watson for the first course in econometrics gives one the impression that it is only a side topic.

A very helpful and well written textbook:
I've only used one other econometrics textbook and this the superior of the two. I felt that the text was excellently written, and gave the instructor and the student the option of treating the subjects as technical or less technical and more conceptual. The appendix in the end of the chapters are very helpful and clearly written. The examples and the outline of the material are clear and concise. This textbook seems very flexible. I recommend it.