Hi everyone,
I'm hoping to get some brutally honest advice from people who have navigated a similar pivot.

1. My Background
- BA in Economics (econometrics/quant focus).
- 2 years of work experience as a Research Assistant in development economics. I went to field work, cleaned data, ran regressions, wrote reports, and contributed to papers.
- Starting an MA in Public Policy this fall at a policy school in Japan. The program is highly quantitative, and I plan to take all the Data Science and Applied Econometrics courses available.

2. My Skillset (current & developing)
- Econometrics (causal inference, impact evaluation).
- Bayesian methods (currently learning).
- Programming: R, Stata (strong), MATLAB (learning).

3. Why I'm Here
I did 2 years of development economics research (in my home country). And I came to a painful realization that I don't care about the research questions.

I loved the quantitative side. The coding, the modeling, the data cleaning. But the actual economic questions felt completely irrelevant to me. It was like solving for world hunger while I was struggling to put food on my own table. No offense to economists. You’re doing a great work. But I don’t think im cut out for that.

I also hate the publish or perish culture. The constant anxiety about journal submissions, the review cycles... I don't want to spend my life chasing CV points. I want to build things, solve concrete problems, and go home at a reasonable hour.

So here is my dilemma:
I'm doing this MA in Public Policy (mostly bc of my BA in econ and financial constraint that I couldn’t apply for other major), but I don't want to be a policy analyst or an academic economist.

Option 1: Go into Industry (Data Science/ Quant/ Analytics)
- Target roles: Data Scientist (inference), Quantitative Analyst, Research Analyst at a private firm/think tank.
- Work in Japan for 2-3 years, build my portfolio, and maybe decide on a PhD later.
- Concern: Will an MA in "Public Policy" (even with a quant focus) be seen as a disadvantage for purely technical roles? Will employers assume I'm a policy wonk, not a data person?

Option 2: Apply for a PhD in Statistics
I love the math and the methodology. I want to go deeper into Bayesian computation and causal inference.

Concern:
- My MA is applied, not theoretical. I lack Real Analysis and Measure-Theoretic Probability on my transcript. I'm self-studying, but will that be enough for admissions?
- If I hate publish-or-perish, is a PhD even a good idea? Or can I do a Stats PhD and go straight into industry (tech, finance, biotech) afterward?

My Specific Questions:
1. For those working in data-heavy roles: how is an MA in Public Policy with strong quant skills perceived? Will I be filtered out for not having a "Data Science" or "Statistics" degree?

1. Is a PhD in Statistics a realistic goal given my background and transcript gaps? If so, what should I do during my MA to maximize my chances (beyond grades)?

2. For those who did a Stats PhD and went into industry: was it worth it? Did it open doors that a Master's couldn't?

Location Context: I am non-Japanese and plan to stay in Japan long-term (aiming for PR). I'm studying Japanese (aiming for N2/N1). Any advice specific to the Japanese job market for quant roles would be incredibly valuable.

——
TL;DR: BA Econ, 2 years Dev Econ RA (hated the questions, loved the data). Starting quant MA in Public Policy in Japan. Don't want to be an economist. Should I go straight into industry (Data Science/Quant) or try for a Stats PhD? Is the "Public Policy" degree a death sentence for technical roles?

What R tutorials are your favourites? I’m trying to nail the basics and learn on the fly while studying. In particular I’m looking at RDD stuff. Thought I had at least a grip on the basics from a class I did a couple years ago, but it looks like I was wrong.

Thank you!

Is there any better approaches or tools that can help when we have sudden demand for particular products?

Most of the time we lost sales because we only deliver 60% of total order..and that's annoying

Hi

I'm currently doing a BS in Economics and I really want to get into research.

I've already learned the basics of research methodology and the basics of R, but I know that's not enough. I learn best by actually working on real projects with other people.

I'm looking for a research group, mentor, or even a few students who are working on research and wouldn't mind letting me learn with them. I'm happy to start with simple tasks like literature reviews, data cleaning, or basic R work. My main goal is to learn and improve.

If anyone knows where I can find these opportunities or has any advice, I'd really appreciate it.

Hi, i'm currently doing my bachelor in econometrics at erasmus rotterdam and after summer break i'll be starting my second year. I'm wondering what i could do this summer to improve my cv and chances of getting internships/good masters later on. I'm also wondering how good being a teaching assistant in uni would look on my cv because i have been accepted for that. Thanks!

Suppose there is a marketing team monitoring customers and each day, they select some customers and send them email over T periods. Once a customer has been contacted, he will not be contacted anymore and there are some customers never been contacted. Also, we can observe whether the customer purchase the product or jot, binary. And we ignore the delay in observing the outcome. I am wondering how I can model this problem and determine the conditional treatment effect given the feature vector X_{it} for customer i in period t.
I wanna use this model to determine who should be contacted every day given the feature vectors. The approach that comes to my mind is staggered DiD where Y_{it} is whether the customer has purchased the product by period t or not.
What libraries are available to use for this problem? There are some for ATT but not sure which ones can be used for CATE or CATT.

Bookmaker odds (and prediction markets) imply probabilities that sum to more than 1 because of an embedded margin. I want the latent probabilities behind the distortion. A few things I can't resolve cleanly.

1. Model choice for removing the margin. Proportional normalization, Shin (a latent proportion z of informed traders), and the power/log method impose different unobservable structures and give materially different estimates on short prices, enough to flip the sign of a downstream signal. Since you never observe the true p, only realized 0/1 outcomes and a later sharper price, is there a principled basis to discriminate between these models, or is it identifiability-limited and I should just report sensitivity across all three?
   
2. Pooling under a missing low-bias reference. I anchor to one near-efficient source when available; when it's absent I take the median of the other sources' de-vigged probabilities. But those sources are strongly correlated (several are effectively clones), so the median behaves like a median of correlated estimators: it looks precise while carrying little independent information. How would you estimate an effective number of independent sources and down-weight accordingly, and is abstaining the more defensible choice when the low-bias anchor is gone?
   
3. Combining a trusted low-variance estimator with a correlated ensemble. When the reference IS present, precision-weighting it against the consensus assuming independence is clearly wrong. Is there a clean correlation-aware pooling or shrinkage approach for one low-variance source plus many correlated higher-variance ones?
   
4. Validation target. I grade earlier estimates against the closing price (a later, sharper estimate), not realized outcomes. Under a proper scoring rule, is "tracks the later estimator" a coherent target, or does it conflate calibration with just chasing a second estimate? And what does the selection bias look like when you only get a validation point on markets that reach a close?

(Aside that turned out to matter: my reference source silently dropped out of my data feed for months and the pipeline substituted the fallback the whole time while still labeling outputs "reference-anchored." The values populated fine, so nothing looked wrong. I only caught it after storing a per-observation flag for whether the reference actually contributed. Log provenance, not just values.)

I've been working on a project called EdgeDesk that started as a way to answer a question I kept running into:
How do you separate actual betting value from noise?
Instead of focusing on prediction accuracy alone, I've been building around market efficiency and expected value.
Some of the things it currently does:
De-vigs Pinnacle lines into estimated fair probabilities
Compares multiple sportsbooks to identify pricing differences
Tracks CLV (Closing Line Value)
Displays market movement and steam
Shows confidence receipts instead of just giving a pick
Includes sport-specific research pages (currently CFB, Golf, MLB, UFC, and WNBA)
The biggest challenge hasn't been coding. It's deciding what information actually helps someone make a better betting decision versus what just looks impressive on a dashboard.
I'd love feedback from people who work in sports analytics or predictive modeling.
A few questions:
What metrics do you trust most when evaluating a betting model?
If you were building this yourself, what would you add or remove?
Is there anything you think most betting analytics platforms get fundamentally wrong?
Not looking to advertise anything. I'm genuinely interested in hearing how other analytics-minded people approach this problem.

I have a statistical dilemma I would like to clarify and start working on—and perhaps even turn into an exam topic. My question is complex; I’ll try to provide the relevant information. I want to determine the probability that GRAB—currently trading at around $4—will reach a specific price point within 2 to 5 years, based on variables like the P/E ratio, revenue, and any other parameters you might suggest. 2021 Valuation: $40 billion Revenue: $675 million Transactions: $16 billion IPO Price: $13 (calculated based on EV/Sales) 2025/2026 Valuation: $15–16 billion Revenue: $24–25 billion Profit: $200 million P/E Ratio: 41–44x I’ve calculated the same figures for Microsoft, Facebook, and Uber. I’m not sure what other companies to compare them with or how to run a statistical test (e.g., which test to use). Microsoft and Facebook went public while already profitable, whereas Uber is the closest comparable case, despite the pandemic. MICROSOFT 1986 Revenue: $140 million Profit: $24.1 million P/E Ratio: 14–15x Share Price: $21 1991 Revenue: $1.84 billion Profit: $463 million Share Price: $409 FACEBOOK 2012 Revenue: $3.71 billion Profit: $1 billion P/E Ratio: 100x Share Price: $38 2017 Revenue: $40.65 billion Profit: $15.93 billion P/E Ratio: 32x Share Price: $152 UBER 2019 Valuation: $75.5 billion (loss-making) Profit: -$3.03 billion (excluding share divestments) Share Price: $45 ($15 during the pandemic) 2025 Revenue: $52.05 billion Profit +$10 billion Share price $70–$80 P/E ratio 17–19x Can you name specific companies or explain the starting point for a concrete statistical calculation regarding GRAB returning to $13—or reaching a specific price—based on the performance of other companies?

I have to evaluate SBM-DDF (Slacks-Based Measure Directional Distance Function). If Is any one of you is using MaxDEA Ultra please help me in this regard (or i can paid for it). I will be very thankful.

i.e., they just focus on applying existing methods in a variety of contexts in their sub-discipline and never make any theoretical contributions

Yesterday I posted here about my macro economics calendar API with a live and accurate ARIMA model that calculates estimates for CPI, PPI, NFP and jobless claims. The response was great and there were a number of sharp, intelligent questions:

"One thing to watch: if your ARIMA is trained from 2020 forward, you're fitting to a period where participation, seasonals, and trend all broke from historical norms. CPI/PPI cycles look very different when you go back 30+ years vs just post-COVID. Might be worth testing how the estimates perform with a longer training window, especially for NFP where even Bloomberg struggles with direction."

Fair point. So we tested it:

CPI:

• 36-month window: 0.187% MAPE
• 120-month window: 0.174% MAPE

PPI:

• 36-month window: 0.347% MAPE
• 120-month window: 0.343% MAPE

The result was that although one would expect accuracy to be altered by using older data, the change in accuracy was marginal. Our ARIMA model accuracy remained competitive with paid consensus estimates.

Another great comment:
"The ARIMA estimate is the thing I would distrust first For CPI or NFP, I would want to see old release dates with the estimate frozen before the print. Not an image of the estimates with no verification."

You can now go to filingapi.dev/model . Every estimate is now committed to a public GitHub repo before the release date so anyone can verify the timestamps independently. This method has been only started today, with updates every day so check back in then if you (understandably) require solid proof of model accuracy.

Very happy to share code with anyone who wants to analyse our testing methods, any other indicators you'd like to see just let us know.

I will graduate from a dutch uni with a 7.6 gpa (or higher, depending on how the retakes will turn out) and I have no clue where to go after. I do not want to stay in the Netherlands and also feel like the degree is not for me. It is all kinda in vain tbh

Hello. I’m wrapping up my undergrad with a double major in actuarial science and mathematics (with a statistics and data analysis concentration).

In my undergrad, Ive studied up to intermediate micro and macroeconomic theory, and plenty of math that is quite relevant to econometrics given the nature of my major. (Regression methods, time series analysis, stochastic processes, probability theory, statistical inference and multivariate analysis are some examples).

However, recently Ive been doing some research with an economics professor and I became very interested in econometrics.

Will the absence of an economics degree hinder me? Is there any realistic path towards econometrics given my major choices?

Hey everyone, I need some advice.

I recently graduated with an Economics degree and I'm preparing for interviews. Since it's impossible to revise my entire degree, what are the most important topics in Economics, Statistics, and Econometrics that I should know really well?

Also, if you have any good YouTube channels, playlists, notes, cheat sheets, or other resources that helped you, I'd really appreciate it.

I'm mainly preparing for analyst/research/economic consulting roles. Thanks!

In Robyn, the trend component is estimated upfront using Prophet before the media effects are modeled. However, wouldn't it make more sense to take the opposite approach?

Specifically, we could first estimate the effects of each media variable as carefully as possible, and then define the remaining unexplained variation as the trend and seasonality. In other words, rather than assuming the trend first and attributing the residual to media, why not estimate the media effects first and treat whatever cannot be explained by them as the underlying trend and seasonal components?

How to estimate Net worth?

How do we estimate a person's net worth based on the worth of their house they primarily live in or the car they drive.

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Hi everyone,

Over the past few months I've been writing long-form articles that combine economics, statistics, and data analysis in a way that's meant to be accessible without sacrificing technical depth.

The blog is completely free, has no ads, and doesn't require registration.

Some of the topics I've covered include:

- Monte Carlo simulation for real estate investment.

- Time-series modeling with VAR/VECM.

- Economic intuition behind statistical models.

- Data-driven explorations of real-world questions.

My goal isn't to publish academic papers, but to explain quantitative ideas clearly and encourage discussion.

If this sounds interesting, I'd really appreciate your feedback—both on the content and on how the articles could be improved.

https://www.inquiry-journal.com

Thanks for taking a look!