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Dear colleagues,

here are some comments and hints to the problem set, that were mentioned in discussions with some of you.

1a) Sometimes it is written that you should do something with the data from 1975, however you can see the data for 1970 only. This is a typo: the point was to use the data from 70's, 80's and current - thus use the 1970 data.
Large amount of countries in the first bin of histogram... maybe using logs of GDP might help for visual presentation.
Furthermore: How to split the data in gretl? I have no idea, maybe some script could be written. But - how about doing that in some spreadsheet editor before importing the data into gretl?

1b) You should test beta2 = -beta3. Variable n in a dataset is the n+g+delta, you should not care about g in a dataset. Another point, we are concerned in growth issues, hence variable y1 is the one that should be included in your regression.

Additional comments to the econometric part - what everything should contain your solution?
1) Some note that will specify what you are doing.
2) Specification of the model you are estimating (=equation).
3) Method used and software used
4) Results (it is not necessary to include the whole output: just those parts, which you find important)
5) Some diagnostics: tests for homoscedasticity, normality and autocorrelation in residuals, nonlinearity test + some comment to these results
6) Most importantly: SUMMARY of your findings. Interpretation of your results. Without interpretation, all previous points are useless, thus no interpretation => no points from the econometric part.

Last but not least: What to do if your results are bad? Writing "my results are bad because ..." is much better than letting bad results uncommented.

And some general technical comments:

Teams: You may work in teams (not only that: you are strongly encouraged to work in teams), but note that the essay should be written by your own.
And, please, write the members of your colleagues with the same version of the first two parts into your problem set. It will make the evaluation process faster.

Formulas etc: if you don't want to write all the formulas in the 2nd part on computer, write it by hand, scan it or make a photography of your solution and insert it as a picture into the document with your problem set. It might be useful to compress them before doing that as the size of the files shouldn't exceed 10MB.

Grading: each part is corrected by one of us. Once one part is corrected, either Eva or Pavel, Tomas or me inputs the points into the comments to the evaluation field of your problem set. At this moment moodle sends you a notification email with your grade. Don't be shocked, that you receive email with two points of six at the first moment - most probably it will be a result of one part only. We will send a notification email after all problem set will be evaluated.

Have a nice weekend,

Jaromir