Duration Modeling in Undergraduate Econometrics Curriculum via Excel

Abstract

The main goal of an Econometrics course is to prepare students for more advanced levels of study and make them able to cope with the empirical problems they are likely to face. In recent years, there has been a tendency to purge merely theoretical topics from the econometric textbooks by including only time honored methods. Survival analysis, however, has so far failed to attract the attention of textbook writers. I conjecture that the general perception of the issue as an advanced topic as well as software barriers have led to this attitude. In this study, I work out an Excel file to outline the fundamental concepts of duration analysis at an introductory level. The file so generated may also be used by practitioners in appropriate cases with minimal learning cost. As such, I hope to dissipate the myth of difficulty associated with this subject matter.