Eviews

Chapter 1. A Quick Walk Through
You and I are going to start our conversation by taking a quick walk through some of
EViews’ most used features. To have a concrete example to work through, we’regoing to
take a look at the volume of trade on the New York Stock Exchange. We’ll view the data as
a set of numbers on a spreadsheet and as a graph over time. We’ll look at summary statistics
such asmean and median together with a histogram. Then we’ll build a simple regression
model and use it for forecasting.
Workfile: The Basic EViews Document
Start up a word processor, and you’re
handeda blank page to type on. Start
up a spreadsheet program, and a grid
of empty rows and columns is provided.
Most programs hand you a
blank “document” of one sort or
another. When you fire upEViews—
no document—just an empty window
with a friendly “Welcome to EViews”
message at the bottom.
Because there aren’t any visual clues
on the opening screen, setting up a
new document in EViewssometimes
bewilders the new user. While word processor documents can start life as a generic blank
page, EViews documents—called “workfiles”—include information about the structure of
your data andtherefore are never generic. Consequently, creating an EViews workfile and
entering data takes a couple of minutes, or least a couple of seconds, of explanation. In the
next chapter we’ll go throughall the required steps to set up a workfile from scratch.
Being impatient to get started, let’s take the quick solution and load an existing workfile. If
you’re working on the computer whilereading, you may want to load the workfile
“nysevolume.wf1” using the menu steps File/Open/EViews Workfile… as pictured on the
next page.
4—Chapter 1. A Quick Walk Through
Now that a workfile’s loadedEViews looks
like this.
Our workfile contains information about
quarterly average daily trading volume on
the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
There’s quite a bit of information, with
over 400...