Timing devices

Ask enough scholars to explain their work, and sometimes surprising descriptions will emerge. "My thesis was on the estimation of persistence, how much you remember from the past," MIT Associate Professor Anna Mikusheva says of her PhD dissertation. It may sound like Mikusheva is a psychologist or a Proust scholar. But she's an econometrician: a scholar who studies the techniques of estimation used in economic models. More precisely, Mikusheva specializes in time-series econometrics, the subdiscipline that examines sequences of observations pertaining to a particular statistical output over time: inflation, gross domestic product, stock prices, and so on. So when Mikusheva talks about "how much you remember," she is being metaphorical about the key issue in time-series econometrics: To what extent are these discrete data points, like the history of a stock price, connected across time? "Time series is exactly about time dependence, how different observations depend on each other," Mikusheva explains. Her work both analyzes existing economics tools in the domain, and helps to develop new techniques that can be applied to time-series problems.