http://pro-libertate.net/20100127/107-read-mostly-harmless-econometrics ( )

Defining a target audience for this book is difficult: It mixes conversational style with heavy derivations. The authors choice to frame all of their expositions in a less common framework does not help lowering the complexity.

The derivations and difficult language, mixed in with some missing explanations and missing higher-level framing of the different topics make this book fairly unaccessible at an even with some level of knowledge in the area of (micro)econometrics, and should potentially be consumed together with a more textbook-style work, which explains the contents within the context.

For more seasoned practitioners, the authors offer some interesting insights in interpretations of model estimates and potentially some (new?) ideas for model designs. The framing of the models in the conditional expectations framework may be insightful, but requires very close reading. But crucially, this book misses out on many more detailed mathematical/statistical/econometrical explanations. I can see that this book could be used as a starting point to dig deeper into one (or more) of the cited texts, or to reflect on some of the user's practices. The review by A. Gelman at https://doi.org/10.1177/1536867X0900900210 gives a more insight into more technical issues with the book.

In addition to these, I found the style of writing and layout of the book difficult to follow, which is extremely dense in some areas and very wordy at others, which is a lot to digest when reading the book front-to-back. I do not think this book works good as a reference work either, due to interdependencies between chapters. (The authors seem to have been aware of this, there is some amount of repetition happening.)

This book is only occasionally harmless, and lacks in some areas of its writing. You may be better off buying a "proper" textbook on microeconometrics, such as Wooldridge or Cameron. ( )

Well, the general framing of this book is just awful. Having no prior knowledge of econometrics and reading it is a pure waste of time as it assumes a great amount of a priori knowledge. Therefore I consider it to be extremely problematic that nowhere in the beginning the target audience is clearly defined. And even if you have a decent amount of knowledge in econometrics this is not going to be easy. To be honest I read this book while working through Woolridge's famous Econometric Analysis of Cross-Section and Panel-Data and for every 10 pages I read in the Woolridge I was just able to understand one in Mostly Harmless Econometrics. Wrapping your head around the conditional-expectation-causal-analysis framework is time-consuming, but on the other hand it describes a perspective on econometrics and empirical research in a totally different way and gives many fascinating insights. But to really appreciate that you need some good foundations in statistics and econometrics. Therefore I consider this book to be everything but not harmless. ( )

The book mixes ’ordinary language exposition’ with heavy-duty equations. The contrast is a bit too much. For me. An interesting book, by an accomplished scientist otherwise. ( )