This book is designed for undergraduate students, applied researchers and practitioners to develop professional skills in econometrics. The contents of the book are designed to satisfy the requirements of an undergraduate econometrics course of about 90 hours. Although the book presents a clear and serious theoretical treatment, its main strength is that it incorporates an interactive computing internet based method that allows the reader to practice all the techniques he is learning theoretically along the different chapters of the book. It provides a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical issues related to linear regression analysis, univariate time series modelling and some interesting extensions such as ARCH models and dimensionality reduction techniques. Furthermore, all theoretical issues are illustrated through an internet based interactive computing method, that allows the reader to learn from theory to practice the different techniques that are developed in the book. Although the course assumes only a modest background it moves quickly between different fields of applications and in the end, the reader can expert to have theoretical and computational tools that are deep enough and rich enough to be relied on throughout future professional careers. The computer inexperienced user of this book is softly introduced into the interactive book concept and will certainly enjoy the various practical examples. The e-book is designed as an interactive document: a stream of text and information with various hints and links to additional tools and features. Our e-book design offers also a complete PDF and HTML file with links to world wide computing servers. The reader of this book may therefore without download or purchase of software use all the presented examples and methods via a local XploRe Quantlet Server (XQS). Such QS Servers may also be installed in a department or addressed freely on the web, click to www.xplore-stat.de and www.quantlet.com. ”Computer-Aided introduction to Econometrics” consists on three main parts: Linear Regression Analysis, Univariate Time Series Modelling and Computa-tional Methods. In the first part, Moral and Rodriguez-Poo provide the basic background for univariate linear regression models: Specification, estimation, testing and forecasting. Moreover, they provide some basic concepts on probability and inference that are required to study fruitfully further concepts in regression analysis. Aparicio and Villanua provide a deep treatment of the multivariate linear regression model: Basic assumptions, estimation methods and properties. Linear hypothesis testing and general test procedures (Likelihood ratio test, Wald test and Lagrange multiplier test) are also developed. Finally, they consider some standard extensions in regression analysis such as dummy variables and restricted regression. ˇ C´ıˇzek and Xia close this part with a chapter devoted to dimension reduction techniques and applications. Since the techniques developed in this section are rather new, this part of of higher level of difficulty than the preceding sections. The second part starts with an introduction to Univariate Time Series Analysis by Moral and Gonzalez. Starting form the analysis of linear stationary processes, they jump to some particular cases of non-stationarity such as nonstationarity in mean and variance. They provide also some statistical tools for testing for unit roots. Furthermore, within the class of linear stationary processes they focus their attention in the sub-class of ARIMA models. Finally, as a natural extension to the previous concepts to regression analysis, cointegration and error correction models are considered. Departing from the class of ARIMA models, Chen, Schulz and Stephan propose a way to deal with seasonal time series. Olave and Alcala end this part with an introduction to Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic Models, which appear to be a natural extension of ARIMA modelling to econometric models with a conditional variance that is time varying. In their work, they provide an interesting battery of tests for ARCH disturbances that appears as a nice example of the testing tools already introduced by Aparicio and Villanua in a previous chapter. In the last part of the book, ˇ Ciˇzkova develops several nonlinear optimization techniques that are of common use in Econometrics. The special structure of the e-book relying in a interactive computing internet based method makes it an ideal tool to comprehend optimization problems. I gratefully acknowledge the support of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 373 Quantifikation und Simulation ¨ Okonomischer Prozesse and Direcci´on General de Investigaci´on
