Without you knowing it, many important economic activities are happening behind the scenes. The rate of a stock, the number of unemployed people, the Gross National Product, the rate of the euro against the dollar. All these processes create a gigantic amount of data. It is an econometricians job to analyse this data in order to say something useful about the future.

In other words: the specialty general econometrics studies mathematical foundations of econometrics and applications in micro- and macro-economics. With this specialty, you try to display the economy through mathematical equations. By means of these equations, it will become clear how a number of economic parameters influence each other and more analyses can be done. This is how a model can predict the rate of a stock, the number of unemployed people, the GNP, exchange rates, etc.

Econometricians can work in many different places. Authorities such as the CBS and CPB want to hire econometricians to advise the government with regards to their policy. But also large banks, institutional investors and pension funds are glad to hire econometricians, because making economic predictions is valuable for them.