Econometrics is the application of statistical or quantitative methods to understand economic issues and test theories, and models. It is the study of economic models, mathematical statistics, and economic data. It is also a set of tools which can verify or disprove economic theory using real-world data. Econometrics is an essential part of university economics degrees.
Econometric software is statistical software that is specialized for econometric analysis. This type of software offers regression analysis including time-series analysis and cross-sectional analysis. Modern econometric software enhances the process of model formulation, estimation and validation, and provides helpful graphical information as well as tables of output. They are important tools in the analysis of stock markets, budget planning, and aid in decision making by policy makers.
For many years the computer package SAS (developed by the SAS Institute) has dominated the econometric software market. Other prominent software includes GAUSS, OxMetrics, Stata, and SPSS. All of these applications are high quality and available for Linux. However, they are commercial software released under proprietary software licenses. The purpose of this article is to identify open source software which allow users to perform econometric analyses.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 high quality open source econometric software. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to use econometrics in everyday life.
Here’s our rating for each application:
Base R ships with a lot of functionality useful for (computational) econometrics, in particular in the stats package. This functionality is complemented by many packages on The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).
Let’s explore the 8 econometric applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.
| Econometric Software | |
|---|---|
| R | Statistical computation and graphics system |
| gretl | Regression, Econometric and Time-Series Library |
| Grocer | Econometric toolbox for Scilab, software similar to Gauss and Matlab |
| GeoDa | Exploratory data analysis and spatial regression |
| gbutils | Set of command line utilities for the manipulation and statistical analysis of data |
| Draco | Econometrics and statistics package |
| Minsky | System dynamics program with additional features for economics |
| Dynare | Software platform for handling a wide range of economic models |
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