Econometricians versus Applied Statisticians
3 May 2007 at 9:13 am Peter G. Klein 1 comment
| Peter Klein |
Econometricians, the joke goes, are people good with numbers but lacking the personality to be engineers. How about applied statisticians? James Greiner offers this comparison:
[W]hat is the difference between an empirical, data-centered economist and an applied statistician? The stereotypes I’ve internalized from hanging out in an East Coast statistics department are that economists tend to focus more on parameter estimation, asymptotics, unbiasedness, and paper-and-pencil solutions to problems (which can then be implemented via canned software like STATA), whereas applied statisticians are leaning more towards imputation and predictive inference, Bayesian thinking, and computational solutions to problems (which require programming in packages such as R).
I imagine the former characterization would apply, a fortiori, to quantitative researchers in strategic management, marketing, accounting, and the like.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science.
Organizations and Markets 
1.
Dheeraj Kattula | 5 May 2009 at 5:03 pm
In the lighter vein
“How would you differentiate a extroverted statistician from an introverted one?”
Ans: The extroverted one looks at the other’s shoes :-)