Statistics

This course is part of the LM degree program and is intended for advanced level student. Enrollment is by consent of instructor. This course provides an overview of the basic tools used by health economists for their empirical investigations, the linear regression model for the analysis of cross-sectional data, and under what conditions the estimated relationship has a causal interpretation. Drawing on critical discussion about some micro-economic applications, the student receives specific data to practice at the computer and learn the basic skills to perform empirical work using the software STATA. At the end of the course, the student is able to understand scientific articles using the linear regression model and is also able to perform their own analysis with this tool. The course discusses topics including an introduction to econometric methods, data, and STATA; simple and multiple regression models (advanced); and a variety of data issues.

The International Internship course develops vital business skills employers are actively seeking in job candidates. This course is comprised of two parts: an internship, and a hybrid academic seminar. Students are placed in an internship within a sector related to their professional ambitions. The hybrid academic seminar, conducted both online and in-person, analyzes and evaluates the workplace culture and the daily working environment students experience. The course is divided into eight career readiness competency modules as set out by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which guide the course’s learning objectives. During the academic seminar, students reflect weekly on their internship experience within the context of their host culture by comparing and contrasting their experiences with their global internship placement with that of their home culture. Students reflect on their experiences in their internship, the role they have played in the evolution of their experience in their internship placement, and the experiences of their peers in their internship placements. Students develop a greater awareness of their strengths relative to the career readiness competencies, the subtleties and complexities of integrating into a cross-cultural work environment, and how to build and maintain a career search portfolio.

 This course offers an introduction to Markov processes in discrete and continuous time. Topics include Markov chains, Poisson process, Markov processes, and an introduction to renewal theory and regenerative processes.

This course examines the fundamentals of Bayesian inference, including the specification of prior and posterior distributions, Bayesian decision theoretic concepts, the ideas behind Bayesian hypothesis tests, model choice and model averaging, the capabilities of several common model types, such as hierarchical and mixture models. It also looks at the ideas behind Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, rejection sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo samplers such as the Gibbs sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, and use of the WinBuGS posterior simulation software.