Finance and insurance

The course aims at introducing students to the theory, the techniques and the advanced practice of econometric analysis in economics and in finance, with special regard to: measuring non observable economic variables, verifying economic theories, forecasting future pattern of real economic and financial variables, evaluating the effects of macro and micro-economic policies. Furthermore, the course will also address some situations where the assumptions of the Ordinary Least Squares estimator do not hold and thus classical regression analysis is not applicable. Particular attention will be paid to models for limited dependent variables and to Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models. Concepts will be presented by means of an extensive use of examples with real economic and financial data, in order to achieve a better understanding of the theoretical concepts and to introduce the students to the practice of computationally-based estimation and validation techniques. Students who pass the exam will know and understand the basic instruments of econometrics and their use to solve empirical economic and financial problems. The discussion of case-studies will make students able to apply econometric tools to answer economic and financial questions of interest. Students will be able to autonomously conduct and comment empirical analyses, also evaluating possible violations of the basic assumptions. Finally, students will be able to interpret and present the results coming from the estimated models, both in oral and in written form.