In the Fall 2021 semester, I took Econ 485 – Econometrics, which is the capstone course for my Business Economics undergraduate degree. The PSU bulletin describes this course as “Applying statistical techniques to test and explain economic relationships; integration of economic theory with observed economic phenomena.”
To achieve these course objectives, we were introduced to the statistics program R. I had never interacted with this software before, and it has quite the learning curve. A major part of the course centers around the final project which had to be completed using R. Over the course of the semester, the students were expected to become proficient enough to think up an economic question, find and clean a data set, and then process the data to draw conclusions within R.
I decided on the topic titled ‘The Impact of Square Footage on Real Estate Value in Allegheny County, PA.’
I chose this topic because I am from Allegheny County, I have always been interested in real estate, and I found a phenomenal database to use that included every parcel in my home county!
The data was published by the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center. The original data set included 581,109 parcel observations with eighty-seven variable columns. After filtering the data extensively, I was still left with 56,889 parcel observations and fourteen variables. The sheer quantity of observations allowed me to produce a final OLS regression that was overwhelmingly significant and showed clear economic trends. I am proud to say I received an A letter grade for this research paper.
The following semester, Spring 2022, I was invited back by my professor to present at the Business Showcase. This showcase is an opportunity for students to present their interesting research and campus involvement. I enjoyed getting to share the research techniques I used and discussing the regression results found.
*Link to the Word document of my project*
*Link to the PowerPoint presentation for my project*
