Statistics

Course Overview

The modern practice of business, economics, and the social sciences requires at least a minimum knowledge of certain statistical tools. The academic literature in finance and economics has become highly mathematical over the past decades. But also business people, economic advisors, policy makers, journalists, etc., even if they do not actively use statistics (although many of them do), are confronted with analyses that use the language of statistics. In the study of statistics we ask the following question: how can we summarize data in a consistent way, so as to draw conclusions from them that can be used in decision-making. Many statistical methods use a particular field of mathematics called Probability Theory, which will be studied in some detail. In addition, statistics uses the same form of logical rigor as mathematics.