Raising the University's profile with world-wide book sales

Thursday, 07 April 2011

Professor Kerry Patterson

Professor Kerry Patterson from the University's School of Economics is internationally renowned in econometrics and since beginning his book series eight years ago, he has raised the profile of the University, and the School of Economics particularly, with his books selling around the world - especially in the important markets of North America, India and the Far East.

The contribution of Professor Patterson was recently recognised by publishers Palgrave Macmillan when their commissioning editor visited the University to present Professor Patterson with a ‘hot of the press' copy of his latest book, ‘Unit Roots in Time Series', which follows his ‘Primer for Unit Root Tests', published last year.

The visit coincided with the launch of Professor Patterson's latest book series to be commissioned by Palgrave-Macmillan, entitled Palgrave Advanced Texts in Econometrics; this follows the very successful Handbook of Econometrics (of 2,800 pages in two volumes, with Professor T C Mills of Loughborough University) and Palgrave Texts in Econometrics.

Overall, these contributions are designed to make the field of econometrics accessible to specialist econometricians and economists and to put the name of the University on the map as far as econometrics is concerned. Put simply, econometrics is the unified study of economic models, mathematical statistics and economic data - and creating accessible texts and research monographs in such a discipline is no mean task.

"Formally econometrics is usually thought of as the application of mathematics and statistics to economics; however, this rather dry definition hides the power of econometrics to confront theories with data and methods of analysis, and so advance economics by developing new models and testable hypotheses" explained Professor Patterson.

"Over the last twenty years or so, this has led to an equal symbiotic relationship between economics and econometrics, recognised in, for example, the award of several Nobel prizes in economics to econometricians."

Professor Patterson's books and those in his series are indispensable reading for all interested in econometrics and applied statistics. They will also be of interest to academics in other disciplines that use time series data, such as geography, climate change and meteorology.